Hatoum’s work often transforms everyday items into sculptures that seem foreign, dangerous, even threatening. The earliest work in the exhibition, Untitled (wheelchair II) from 1999, exemplifies many of the foundational tenets of Hatoum’s sculptures; the appropriation of utensils or furniture to witty, often surreal effect, or the presencing of the absent body to hauntingly poetic ends. Hatoum’s stainless-steel wheelchair is stripped of comfort and has handles that have been modelled into blades, each broadly serrated to accommodate the grip of the hands. An instrument of care turned against the carer Hatoum has remarked on the work’s relationship to the proverbial notion of ‘biting the hand that feeds you’. An early work that speaks to the psychosocial currents preoccupying much of Hatoum’s work, Untitled (wheelchair II) gestures towards the infirm body and questions of institutional care.

Hatoum’s new work, Divide (2025), comprises a life-size, three-part hospital screen in which the usual cloth panels have been replaced by gridded, barbed wire. No longer a protective screen providing privacy, this intervention instead erects an exposing barrier that threatens to wound. A recurring motif in Hatoum’s oeuvre – the grid and fence structures granting access to sight but not touch – this hospital screen amplifies the cleave between those on either side of the divide. The grid also forms the basis of Hatoum’s artwork Mirror (2025), a wall-mounted cage constructed from rebar. Contrary to its title, there is a distinct lack of reflective surface in Mirror; where the viewer may expect to see their own reflection, they are instead confronted with the gridded lattice that warps as they move around it. Furthering these notions of containment and witness – as well as their possible formal expression – Untitled (fence, mirrored) (2018) superimposes the likeness of a chain-link fence upon a reflective-coated paper.

Misbah (2006–7) represents and addresses the idea of conflict more directly: for this work, Hatoum asked an artisan in Cairo to create a ‘lantern’ in which the brass casing’s apertures were cut into the silhouettes of soldiers, set within a galaxy of star-like explosions. Mesmerically combining light and movement, Misbah rotates and projects an endless sequence of marching soldiers on the surrounding walls, heightening a sense of disquiet through its appeal to a childlike sensibility. To these ends, the toy soldier makes another appearance in Hatoum’s heliogravure print Over My Dead Body (2005), a portrait of the artist staring down a tiny soldier figurine that stands balanced upon her nose. ‘I was playing with scale to reverse the power relationship, by reducing the symbol of threatening masculinity to a small toy’, as the artist remarks. Though more oblique in nature, Hatoum’s recent artwork Still Life (medical cabinet) VI (2025) again tantalises and unsettles the viewer, with its hand-blown glass grenades in jewel-like colours delicately placed in a medical cabinet.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, an artwork from Hatoum’s ongoing ‘Hair Necklace’ series features. Made up of carefully collected strands of the artist’s own shed hair rolled into beads, the very first iteration of Hatoum’s ‘necklace’ was displayed in a shop window at the famous French jeweller Cartier, in Bordeaux, in 1995. Thirty years on, Hatoum has collected her silvered hair to create Hair Necklace (silver) (2025), making a reference to the precious metal, thus elevating its status from abject material to jewellery. Hatoum’s ‘Composition with Circles’ series (2018), too, makes use of the artist’s curled hairs, this time arranged flat on a plain piece of paper and reduced to formal qualities described by its title.

This presencing of the absent body continues through to the sculpture Inside Out (2019) and a number of other works on paper. Hand Made Paper and Untitled (brain) (both 2003), for example, allude to the body’s organicism by manipulating white pulp into low reliefs of blood vessels and brain lobes. In contrast with the rigid lines of the grid, Hatoum’s large-scale concrete sphere Inside Out is inscribed with an intricate circuitous pattern suggestive of entrails, which, along with Untitled (Henna drawing 5) (1999), ground the viewer in the unseen complexities of the body’s interior. In its reaffirmation of existence and the basic bodily functions that enable survival, this intense focus on corporeality is the artist’s humorous reminder of mortality. Conveying the breadth of Hatoum’s groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artistic practice, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s long-standing concerns through a selection of new and historical works. Minimalist in aesthetic and poetic in nature, Hatoum’s work destabilises perceived certainties to expose the paradoxes and alternative narratives that underlie a seemingly familiar world.

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and has lived and worked in London since 1975. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2025); KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022–23); Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2022–23); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2022); Magasin III, Stockholm (2022); Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Spain (2021); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2017); Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, touring to Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri (2017–18); Centre Pompidou, Paris, touring to Tate Modern, London and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2015–16); Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2014); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2013); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2012); Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2010); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy (2009); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2005); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, touring to Magasin III, Stockholm and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (all 2004); Tate Britain, London (2000); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (1999); and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois, touring to New Museum, New York (1997).

Hatoum has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2025); 4th Bruges Triennial, Belgium (2024); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023); Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2023); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022); ICA Boston (2022); Rabat Biennale, Morocco (2019); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2018); Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens (both 2017); 6th Marrakesh Biennale (2016); 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2011); 15th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006); 51st Venice Biennale, Italy (2005); Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); The Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London (1995); 46th Venice Biennale, Italy (1995); and 4th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (1995).

Among other awards, Hatoum has received the Praemium Imperiale (2019), the 10th Hiroshima Art Prize (2017) and the Joan Miró Prize (2011).