Mona Hatoum [Widescreen]

Episode of Series “TheEYE”.
Part of a series of interview-based profiles of contemporary visual artists in Britain. The artist Mona Hatoum came to London from Lebanon in 1975. Working initially with performance and video, and in the 1990s with sculpture and installations, she has exhibited widely around the world. In the summer of 2000, Mona Hatoum presented three major new works which marked the inauguration of Tate Britain, London. These works, exhibited under the title ‘The Entire World as a Foreign Land’, developed Hatoum’s interest in the relationship between individual identity and the notion of a broader cultural and geographic identity, or sense of ‘belonging’. In this interview, illustrated with these works and with other key installations, Hatoum explores the diverse sources of her work and her engagement with a wide range of often surprising materials. The artist talks vividly about the centrality of the body to her installations, and the ways in which her work employs changes of scale, intimations of restriction and constraint, and contradictory ideas of attraction and repulsion.