My works are full of associations and meanings—a reflection on the social environment we inhabit. Unlike Minimalist objects, they are not self-referential.
Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum’s oeuvre is based on the body as a projection screen for social and political topics. Born in 1952 to a Palestinian family in Beirut, she emigrated in 1975 to London, where she experienced being a foreigner through her own body. In the 1980s she translated these experiences into disconcerting performances. Since the 1990s she has been making sculptures and installations in which the absent body and the home serve as metaphors for threats and vulnerability. Austere forms contrast with fragile materials; everyday objects feign comfort but reveal latent danger. “I like to use furniture in my work because it is about everyday life. . . . If these objects become either unstable or threatening, they become a reference to our fragility.” (Hatoum)

The ambivalence that the artist provokes refers to the loss of trust and tangibility. In her work, Hatoum expands the formal possibilities of Minimalism by adding the the political and the existential. By overcoming the self-referentiality of art, the artist has become an art icon of the past decades, which is reflected by exhibitions in leading museums all over the world, such as Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2015 and the Tate in London in 2016. She received the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2004, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2010, the Joan Miró Prize in 2011, and the Praemium Imperiale in Japan in 2019.

The Kunst Museum Winterthur has presented works by Mona Hatoum in thematic exhibitions on sculpture and video art many times. Her solo exhibition will offer comprehensive insight into the impressive and oppressive work of one of the leading contemporary artists.

Curated by Konrad Bitterli