Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
Mona Hatoum, LB
Electrified (St Gertrud). Kitchen utensils, furniture, electric wire, light bulb and variable transformer ca. 712 × 353 × 464 cm.
Mona Hatoum works across a diverse range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. She reflects on subjects arising from our current global condition, such as systems of control, the architecture of surveillance and themes of conflict and displacement. She uses a minimal language to convey her ideas, employing a wide variety of materials ranging from steel, brick and concrete to rubber, glass and human hair.
Hatoum began her career in London in the early 1980s making performances that touched on social and political issues. Using her own body as both subject and tool, she presented it as a battleground for political, social, and gender conflicts. In the 1990s, she turned her attention to large-scale installations and sculptures designed to evoke conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination in the viewer. She often transformed familiar, everyday domestic objects into foreign, threatening and dangerous things to make people question everything around them.