Mona Hatoum: Unhomely

The works of Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum, who currently lives in London and Berlin, incorporate very real topics. Many of her sculptures deal with conditions in the world's crisis regions, or exile; others show that familiar objects from everyday life can become very alien things. Hatoum's works appeal to the body as a common site of experience of scale, material, place and pain. "So while they may be read specifically in terms of her own personal history and the extreme experience of alienation and instability that is the fate of the exile, they also refer to the themes of memory, home, movement, location and space that are part of everyone's physical existence," as Kirsty Bell writes in her essay. Regardless of whether Hatoum works with barbed wire or sandbags, or magnifies kitchen graters into human-scale sculptures, she always succeeds in turning a familiar object into something else, something eerie, something unhomely.