Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952.
Hatoum works in sculpture, conceptual and situational art work, utilising everyday objects that are found in the home. She also has a fascination with electricity, wiring objects up, such as furniture, and making them 'live'. Hatoum's work references themes of domesticity and its negative connotations. As opposed to images of comfort, the appearance of 'comfort' can also mean something more sinister; like the entrapped housewife, or even someone incarcerated. In other words, she likes to explore ideas that reveal that appearances can be deceiving. Hatoum also has created video installation pieces and performance art of exploratory surgery on her own body. She is interested in how we are ignorant of our bodies; that our insides are quite foreign to us.
In her early years she first aspired to becoming a painter and showed great aptitude for drawing. As a teenager she wanted to be an artist but her father refused to send her to art school, preferring her to get a 'real-job'. (John Tusa Interview with the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, BBC radio) . Hatoum's father was employed by the British Embassy and she had a comfortable loving home life.
As a compromise for her father, Hatoum ended up studying graphic design at university in Beirut. After graduation she worked for two years in an advertising agency which she claimed 'depressed' her.
She left for London and studied art at the Slade School of Art and the Byam Shaw School of Art.
Hatoum claims to have no real routine in her art practice, preferring to work intuitively and at times creating and evolving the work at the exhibition space...the space and place dictating the work. Though she shows her work in the big art museums, Hatoum prefers doing residences in little obscure places;
'I much prefer these situations which are not fantastic for my career, for instance like going to an obscure little gallery in Cairo is not going to sort of advance my career in any way, but that's the area, that is the kind of situation that inspires me and maybe will make me carry on making new ideas and new works that are inspired from that situation'. (John Tusa Interview with the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, BBC radio)

Hatoum has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including The Turner Prize (1995), Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005) and Biennale of Sydney (2006). Solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1997), The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1999), Tate Britain, London (2000), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005), Parasol Unit, London (2008), Darat Al Funun, Jordan (2008) and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2009).

Hatoum now lives and works in London and Berlin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Hatoum

Mona Hatoum is listed in the following categories.

Contemporary Sculptor
Find contemporary working sculptors using a variety of themes and mediums.

Famous Conceptual Artists
Find famous artists who create conceptual art such as installations, performance art and video art.

Famous Sculptors
Find famous artists with sculpture portfolios online that are abstract, contemporary, realist, expressive and more.

UK Artists
List of contemporary working UK painters and artists based in the country of United Kingdom.

UK Art Companies
Browse UK art resources and artists by region throughout the country of the United Kingdom.