Artist Mona Hatoum – January 2006
In a presentation at the Library of the Townhouse gallery on Wednesday 4 January 2006 at 7 pm, Artist Mona Hatoum showed images of her work, talked about her experience, and answered questions by young artists, art students, critics and members of the public.
Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut and since 1975 has lived and worked in London. She originally went to England on a visit and stayed on when the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon prevented her returning.
After completing her studies, Hatoum first became widely known in the mid 80s for a series of performance and video works which focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the ’90s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installation works that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.
Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects like chairs, beds, cots and kitchen utensils are transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous objects. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in ‘Corps étranger’ (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body.Hatoum’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, the United States and Canada. In 1997 a survey of her work was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and toured to The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York , MoMA, Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (1998). Hatoum’s exhibition ‘The Entire World as a Foreign Land’ was the inaugural exhibition for the launch of Tate Britain, London in 2000. Other recent solo exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), ‘Domestic Disturbance’, Site Santa Fe and Mass MoCA (2000-2001), and a major survey of her work at the Centro de Arte de Salamanca and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea , Spain (2002-03).
Hatoum is the 2004 winner of the prestigious Sonning Prize given biennially by the University of Copenhagen. She is also the 2004 winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize from Zurich.
Mona Hatoum was in Egypt upon an invitation by the Townhouse Gallery where she presented her new work in the exhibition “Kairotic”, curated by Susan Hefuna. Hatoum’s participation is supported by Culture Resource (Al Mawred Al Thaqafy), the British Council, the Goethe Institute and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Program).
