Throughout Mona Hatoum’s artworks, she uses the simplest elements, shapes and exercises to
provoke the source of traumatic feelings or anxieties, pains, dangers and threats. In addition, she
seeks to arouse viewers curiosities and imaginations.
The ordinary materials and objects in her artworks from light bulbs to giant cheese graters
become increasingly unpleasant and most of the times reveal harmful and dangerous intentions in their
character. The relation between human experiences and confines found in her works and enable us
to understand how contemporary art can be drawn from the experience of conflict and crisis and
also how they can create a private, safe place for introspection.
Ultimately a sense of systematic repetition of a theme that Hatoum manifested in different
physical works are like the memories we cannot escape from, they are always a part of us. Like a
core identity, it follows us wherever we go and escape from.
Mona Hatoum has experimented and revisited forms of structure and ordinary objects. Like
the threaded beads throughout her work, they become striking and mandatory elements reinforcing
as the concepts they embody, recurring in a variety of scales.