Press orientation:

Thursday, 1 October 2026, 11.00 am, with artist Mona Hatoum and Director Konrad Bitterli (please register in advance) or a private guided tour by appointment.

Kunst Museum Winterthur | Beim Stadthaus
Museumstrasse 52
8400 Winterthur

The Kunst Museum Winterthur presents Routes of Dissonance, a major solo exhibition by Mona Hatoum, on view from 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. Featuring sculptures and installations that transform everyday objects into unsettling reflections on conflict, displacement, and vulnerability, the exhibition invites visitors to explore her work along multiple routes through the museum.

Routes of Dissonance is the title of Mona Hatoum’s extensive solo exhibition at the Kunst Museum Winterthur. The title subtly reflects the turbulence of our times and the various ways of dealing with these upheavals. At the same time, it refers to the layout of the exhibition hall in Winterthur, which, unlike museums with a classical hierarchical structure, allows visitors to take different routes to view and discover Mona Hatoum’s art.

The body as a site of social and political conflict forms the basis of Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice. Born in 1952 to a Palestinian family in Beirut, she found herself stranded in London in 1975 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out, preventing her from returning home. This firsthand experience of being an outsider was translated into her unsettling performances of the 1980s. Since the early 1990s, she has created sculptures and installations in which the absent body, like the private home, serves as a metaphor for threat and vulnerability. Austere forms contrast with fragile materials, and everyday objects appear comfortable yet reveal latent danger. ‘I like to use furniture in my work because it is about everyday life. If these objects are either unstable or threatening, they become a reference to our fragility.’ (Hatoum)

The ambivalence evoked by the artist points to the loss of the familiar and the tangible. In her work, Mona Hatoum expands the formal possibilities of Minimal Art to encompass the political and existential. By transcending the self-referential nature of art, the artist has become a leading figure in the art world in recent decades, as evidenced by her solo exhibitions at major museums worldwide, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2015, the Tate in London in 2016, the Menil Collection in Houston in 2017. In 2004, she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize; in 2010, the Käthe Kollwitz Prize; in 2011, the Joan Miró Prize; in 2017, the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize and in 2019, the Praemium Imperiale in Japan.

The Kunst Museum Winterthur has presented works by Mona Hatoum on several occasions in thematic exhibitions on sculpture and video art. Routes of Dissonance offers an in-depth look at her work, which is as impressive as it is unsettling.

Curated by Konrad Bitterli