Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Mona Hatoum in Holzmarktstraße 15-18. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Berlin.
The main work in the exhibition with the ambiguous title Hot Spot is a lit-up globe, above human height. An elegant object that nevertheless can be seen as a vision of the whole world as a dangerous place caught up in conflict and unrest.
Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952 and since 1975 has lived and worked in London. She originally went to England on a visit and stayed on when the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon prevented her returning.
After studying at the Byam Shaw and the Slade School of Art in London, Hatoum first became widely known in the mid ‘80s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. Since the beginning of the '90s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installation works that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects like chairs, beds, cots and kitchen utensils are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous objects. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in Corps étranger (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body.
Hatoum's work has been exhibited widely in solo exhibitions in Europe, the United States and Canada. Her exhibition The Entire World as a Foreign Land was the inaugural exhibition for the launch of Tate Britain, London in 2000.
She has also participated in the 1995 Venice Biennale, the 1995 Istanbul Biennial, Documenta XI, 2002, the 2005 Venice Biennial and will be participating in the upcoming Biennale of Sydney in June of this year. In 2004 the largest and most comprehensive survey of her work, including new site-specific pieces, was initiated by the Hamburger Kunsthalle and travelled to the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall and the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art (2005). Hatoum was "Artist-in-Residence" on the DAAD program (Berliner Künstlerprogramm, Deutscher Akademischer Austrauschdienst) in 2003-2004 and has since divided her time between Berlin and London.
Further exhibitions:
April 28 - June 3, 2006
Zimmerstrasse 90/91: Beatriz Milhazes
Temporary space at OsramHöfe, Oudenarder Strasse 16-20: Marepe
Upcoming exhibition:
June 9 – July 15: Haluk Akakçe
Zimmerstrasse 90-91: (drawings)
Holzmarktstrasse 15-18: (video)
