About the exhibition
Individual. Family. Home. Conflict. Displacement. Dislocation. Alienation. Mona Hatoum’s artistic practice focuses on concepts that are constantly being revised and are always engaging. Employing a concentrated idiom in a career spanning over 40 years, her art has transitioned from performance to large-scale sculpture and installation.
I first met Hatoum on a studio visit during her Swedish Arts Grants Committee IASPIS residency in Stockholm in 2001. We embarked on a conversation about organising a major presentation of her work at Magasin III where I worked at the time. The exhibition was held in 2004 in collaboration with two German museums.
Some of the works included in the exhibition So Much I Want To Say at Accelerator were produced in the early part of Hatoum’s career, in the mid-1980s, and others were conceived in conjunction with the above mentioned exhibition at Magasin III. Thus the works presented in the Accelerator exhibition span these 20 years. During this time, Hatoum’s practice has changed, particularly in relation to the techniques she works with, but is still nevertheless characterised by a consistent, restrained expression and a frequent undertone of conflict or unrest.
Working largely immaterially, with performance and the moving image, Hatoum’s early works were explicitly political and influenced by her life story and dislocated existence. Although the political dimension continues to play a role in her art, the installation and sculptural works have acquired a more ambiguous and indirect strategy where concepts and ideas are articulated through the formal and material reality of her objects and environments.
About Mona Hatoum
Mona Hatoum was born in 1952 to a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon. While she was on a short visit to London in 1975, the Lebanese civil war broke out and prevented her from returning home. She has lived in London ever since. Hatoum has participated in numerous prestigious international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennales (1995 and 2005), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), the Bienniale of Sydney (2006), the Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011) and the Moscow Bienniale (2013).
Hatoum’s latest solo exhibition in Sweden took place at Magasin III in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include a major survey organised by Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015) that toured to Tate Modern, London and KIASMA, Helsinki (2016) and a US tour initiated by the Menil Collection, Houston (2017) that travelled to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis (2018). She has a long list of international distinctions which include being awarded the Joan Miró Prize (2011), the Rolf Shock Prize given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (2011), the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize (2017) and the Praemium Imperiale (2019). More recently she received the Julio González Prize 2020 from IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain, where she had a large solo exhibition in 2021.
