Mona Hatoum

Born in the Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid 1970s and where, in 1995, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Through performance, video, sculpture and installation she creates architectonic spaces which relate to the body, language and the condition of exile. One of her most spellbinding and best known works is a video installation titled Corps etranger, where the spectator enters a small pavilion and takes a visual journey through all the orifices of the artist's body. Such works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial and otherness. Hatoum's many international exhibitions include the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1994); her work tours extensively to museums throughout the United States in 1997. The distinguished British critic Guy Brett, explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication which emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist, Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and previous interviews.

Born in Lebanon, Mona Hatoum was exiled to London where she has lived and worked since the 1970s and where, in 1995, she was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Through performance, video, sculpture and installation she immerses her audiences in emotional and psychic states -- as they take a journey through all the orifices of the artist's body; watch her 'drowning' in mud in a glass box; or walk down a long tunnel towards a light which literally will burn them. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works are nonetheless powerful evocations of statelessness, denial and otherness.