Mona Hatoum by Retuta, Athena Frances

Corps étranger (1994)

2368373_1 — 2025-04-24 23:14:38 UTC

This video is played surrounded by a sound of the artist's very own heartbeat and bodily movements. This experience blurs boundaries between self and other, private and public. It asks: how do we feel when our most personal spaces are laid out in the open for everyone to see?

2368373_1 — 2025-04-24 23:15:51 UTC

2368373_1 — 2025-04-24 23:16:39 UTC

Grater Divide (2002)

2368373_1 — 2025-04-24 23:54:37 UTC

Hatoum challenges us to see everyday objects in a different way– as symbols of division and conflict. Placed in a gallery, it makes us question about how borders– literal or metaphorical– can protect some while cutting others.

Light Sentence (1992)

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:03:48 UTC

Hatoum uses the grid to reference systems of order and control. The slowly rotating light bulb transforms the shadows of the grid.

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:06:16 UTC

Tate. “Who Is Mona Hatoum? | Tate.” Tate, 2016, www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mona-hatoum-2365/who-is-mona-hatoum#none2

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:06:46 UTC

“Mona Hatoum.” Artnet.com, 2022, www.artnet.com/artists/mona-hatoum/.

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:10:40 UTC

“Mona Hatoum.” Artreview.com, 2016, artreview.com/october-2016-review-mona-hatoum/.

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:13:45 UTC

“Mona Hatoum | MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, 2019, www.moma.org/artists/7447-mona-hatoum.

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 00:14:14 UTC

“Corps Étranger - 4:3.” 4:3, 2025, fourthree.boilerroom.tv/film/mona-hatoum-corps-etranger-1994/.

Alberti

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 17:42:11 UTC

Alberti shows that everyday things gain new stories when they move into a gallery. In Light Sentence, the plain wire cages becomes a living grid of light and shadow that changes how we move and feel in the space. In Corps stranger, the endoscope travels from inside Hatoum's body into the gallery showing the story of both the tool and the artist's flesh. Grater Divide, a kitchen grater turns into a big room divider, making us think about how ordinary objects can become symbols of separation.

Cynthia Freeland

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 17:45:32 UTC

Freeland reminds us that art isn't just emotion or ritual but objects speaking through their content. For Light Sentence, the grid becomes eerie and alive when the shadows shifts. In Grater Divide, the enlargement of the simple grater into a barrier shows how artists can make us question everyday walls.

Others' Bodies

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 18:10:27 UTC

When the insides of Mona Hatoum's is projected, it overturns the doctor-patient relationship and transforms into viewers and viewed. The grater puts a wall between people, echoing how pictures in the past drew invisible lines between classes or races.

Silcock

2368373_1 — 2025-04-25 18:13:40 UTC

Silcock shows how women artists were blocked from life-drawing classes and had to invent new ways to paint nudes. Similarly, Hatoum borrows a "man's" minimalist look but makes it her own, proving women can master any style. Hatoum becomes her own model and filmmaker, using her own body. by blowing up a common kitchen tool, she shows that home utensils can also carry big political and artistic messages.

Who is she?

2368373_1 — 2025-04-27 20:13:43 UTC

Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian-born artist who lives and works in London. Early in her career, while studying at the Slade School of Art, she began using performance to explore how politics, gender and race shape individual experience. In the late 1980s she shifted to installations and sculptures made from a wide range of materials, often using grids or geometric forms to hint at systems of social control. She also transforms everyday household objects by changing their size or form, making familiar things feel strange and unsettling.

Fun fact

2368373_1 — 2025-04-27 20:18:20 UTC

Hatoum blew up an everyday cheese grater to about 6ft tall.

Built like a folding screen used for privacy, it evokes the idea of "screening" or checking people sort of like border checkpoints.

Title

2368373_1 — 2025-04-27 20:20:23 UTC

The title is a pun: here, "sentence" suggests a punishment or imprisonment, while "light" refers both to illumination and to being weightless. Justice is being delivered by light alone.