Mona Hatoum: Unhomely

by Kirsty Bell

The works of Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum, who currently lives in London and Berlin, incorporate very real topics. Many of her sculptures deal with conditions in the world's crisis regions, or exile; others show that familiar objects from everyday life can become very alien things. Hatoum's works appeal to the body as a common site of experience of scale, material, place and pain. "So while they may be read specifically in terms of her own personal history and the extreme experience of alienation and instability that is the fate of the exile, they also refer to the themes of memory, home, movement, location and space that are part of everyone's physical existence," as Kirsty Bell writes in her essay. Regardless of whether Hatoum works with barbed wire or sandbags, or magnifies kitchen graters into human-scale sculptures, she always succeeds in turning a familiar object into something else, something eerie, something unhomely.

104 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Elysia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to pick this book up as further research from my fine arts class at Uni, as we studied Mona Hatoum in one of our Luminosity topics, and although I enjoyed some of her works, they didn't grab my attention as much as some of the other artists we studied. I particularly enjoyed 'Undercurrent (Red) 2008', 'Home 1999' and 'Static 2006'