BOOK:Mona Hatoum,Phaidon Publications

“Mona Hatoum” is a revised and expanded edition of one the most popular monographs of Phaidon Publications. In the 240 pages of the book the reader will find 240 Illustrations, writings by Mona Hatum, Interview by Michael Archer, a Survey by Guy Brett and Focus by Catherine de Zegher, covering all her oeuvre. Mona Hatoum began her artistic career creating performance and video works in which the body gave expression to a divided reality, besieged by political and social control. Since the early ‘90s she began to focus on making sculptures and large-scale installations.  In an Interview in Bomb Magazine Mona Hatum says for her cultural background “Although I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging them from integrating into the Lebanese situation. When I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created a kind of dislocation, [which] manifests itself in my work…” Her work is rooted in notions of displacement, uncertainty and power structures, subjects that are addressed through the use of familiar, everyday domestic objects transformed into foreign, uncanny things that hit viewers in the gut. Hatoum’s practice also deals with issues related to the making of art and, in particular, with questions about the inherent physicality of sculpture as well as our relationship to the formal concerns of space and material.-Dimitris Lempesis