Mona Hatoum

(Beirut, Lebanon, 1952)

A conceptual, minimalist and surrealist artist, there are a series of constant themes in his work: cartography, war and the conversion of domestic objects into artifacts with ambiguous connotations. His work is characterized by fragility and instability, in line with this he uses materials such as soap and glass. They are the ingredients in works like Map, a huge world map made with thousands of transparent marbles on the ground, which can alter the world order with a simple misstep, or Present Tense, a kind of puzzle made with 2,200 bars of soap, which represents a Fragmented map of the Oslo Peace Accords in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The presence of violence and death in Hatoum's production, very marked by the civil war in Lebanon, is seen in pieces of metal structures, maps and glass grenades - between the beautiful and the painful -, multiple bunk beds, uncomfortable beds and barbed wire cages.
The video installation Corps étranger is one of the works exhibited at MediaLab; endoscopic images of the artist's body are projected onto the floor of a booth. Once inside the small space, the visitor begins to hear noises that he cannot identify and becomes familiar with the images coming from the inside of a human body: membranes, mucous membranes, hair, teeth. Breathing, heartbeat and the bubbling of internal organs intensify the feeling of discomfort. Returning the inside to the outside, making the invisible visible, following the path of metabolism within the body itself, the artist illuminates what is hidden: the digestive tract. It also shows us that our own body and its familiar envelope can be as unreal as a foreign body.