Born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon.
Lives and works in London.


Born to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum studied in London in the mid-1970s. Her political beliefs are poetically realised through installations, sculptures, video, photographs and works on paper, employing a variety of often unconventional mediums, such as hair, marbles, maps and household items.

In the 1980s, Hatoum explored state oppression and surveillance through performance and video, often focusing intensely on the body.

From the early 1990s, her work developed into large installations and sculptures exploring notions of displacement and global conflict involving opposing emotions of desire and repulsion, fear and fascination.

In 2019, Mona Hatoum has been awarded the Praemium Imperiale prize for Sculpture, submitted by Japan Art Association, the most historical cultural foundation in Japan.
 
She was presented with a number of other prizes during her career, such as the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize by Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2017), Joan Miró Prize of the Fundació Joan Miró (2011), Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southampton (2010), or Roswitha Haftmann Stiftung Prize (2004) among others.

In 2015, her exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Paris travelled to Tate London, then to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki (2016).
Her work has been shown in several solo exhibitions, in institutions such as the Menil Collection, Houston, U.S.A. (2017) that toured to Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St Louis, U.S.A. (2018); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2017); Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015); Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil (2014); Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium (2014); Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2014); Kunstmuseum St-Gallen, Switzerland (2013); Arter, Istanbul, Turkey (2012); Juan Miro Fundacion, Barcelona, Spain (2012); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2009); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy (2009); Museum of contemporary art, Sydney, Australia (2005); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2004), Magasin III, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico (2003); Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain (2002).

Her work will also be presented during two solo exhibitions in 2020, one at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam and the other at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, in 2020.