Mona Hatoum at Fundación Proa

Fundación Proa presents the first exhibition of work by widely recognized contemporary artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut) ever held in Argentina.

Curated by Chiara Bertola, the exhibition contains a broad selection of Hatoum’s production. The show encompasses the artist’s early performances and videos from the eighties and an installation created especially for the event, thus evidencing, in conjunction with other installations and videos, as well as photographs, sculptures, and objects, the breath of her production and its development.

Starting in the nineties, her work veered toward sculpture and highly political large-scale installations. Since that time, her work has been characterized by the reuse of commonplace and banal objects, inoffensive and harmless things rendered, in her production, hostile and suspicious. By means of surprising changes in scale and subtle combinations and alterations, the objects Mona Hatoum creates are both familiar and strange: they dislocate and even jar the viewer. “All this is designed to recall and disturb at the same time,” writes Edward Said in an essay on Hatoum’s production.

In the curatorial text published in the exhibition catalogue, Chiara Bertola explains that for the artist “aesthetic experience is integral to everyday life.” Her work, Bertola goes on, “is bound up with life, with all its implications of wonder, amazement, irony and intimacy, but also rooted in an awareness of conflict and violence, of nomadism and personal freedom being taken away.”