T42

Mona Hatoum

1993–98

Fine stoneware

Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Born 1952 in Beirut) has long associated the familiar with the uncanny in an arresting and visceral oeuvre. In the 1980s, she made video and performance works that explore political, ethnic, and personal identity through the body, often her own. At the end of the 1980s, she began to focus on common domestic objects—including kitchen utensils and house furnishings—that she transmogrified into hostile large-scale sculptures. The domestic interior is no longer a place of protection and safety but the locus of ambiguous and foreboding mutation. In metaphorical terms, the transformation of the