Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist living and working in London who has generated excitement in the art world with her videos and installations. Her recent work includes the remarkable video installation Corps Ètranger (1994), produced with the assistance of a surgeon. The video maps an internal and external self-portrait of the artist through such complex medical procedures as endoscopy, colonoscopy, and echography. This MCA-organized, national touring exhibition, the artist’s first one-person show presented by an American museum, features more than 25 works, most of which have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Providing a survey of Hatoum’s work from the last 15 years, the exhibition will concentrate on the artist’s more recent production of installations, sculpture, and photographic works. In addition, three video works by Hatoum that were acquired last year by the MCA—the artist’s first objects to enter the permanent collection—will be presented in the museum’s video gallery. The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will include an essay by MCA Curatorial Assistant Jessica Morgan, who is organizing the show.

About the Artist

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952. She has lived in England since the outbreak of civil war in Beirut in 1975. After graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1981, Hatoum embarked on a career as a performance artist. Since the mid-1980s, however, she has concentrated on the production of installations, videos, sculpture, and, most recently, photography.

Hatoum has exhibited internationally. Her important one-person shows include the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 1993, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1994, the Tate Gallery in London in 1995, and the current MCA-organized, US touring exhibition. She was invited to show her work in the prestigious Venice Biennial in 1995, and she has exhibited in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montreal, to name just a few.

In addition to the MCA permanent collection, Hatoum’s work is represented in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.