Mona Hatoum. Behind the Seen

The dimension of the body—not only as a physical organism but also as a political and affective entity—is central to her work. Her early performances in the 1980s directly explored the relationship between the female body, urban space, and surveillance devices. Later, the body disappears from the stage, replaced by traces, imprints, or symbolic objects of confinement: cages, beds, and hospital screens become spatial metaphors of its absence-presence, evoking a vulnerable subjectivity exposed to control.
The theme of control runs through Hatoum’s research by means of minimal structures that incorporate allusive, threatening materials: barbed wire, iron, glass, steel. Domestic objects—beds, chairs, utensils—are destabilised, transformed into instruments of containment or aggression. This unsettled domesticity suggests that dynamics of power, coercion, and discipline can permeate even spaces of intimacy.Her personal experience—born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, unable to return home because of war—informs a poetics of displacement that manifests itself not so much in narrative terms, but in spatial and perceptual ones. Territory is often evoked through fragmented forms, impossible cartographies, or obstructed paths. Twelve Windows (2012–2013) is an emblematic example: created in collaboration with the craftswomen of the Lebanese association Inaash, it presents twelve panels of traditional Palestinian embroidery suspended in space on red washing lines. The installation creates an environment crossed by visual and physical barriers, evoking the themes of diaspora and exiled identity.This topography of instability also appears in works such as Divide (2025), a hospital screen turned into a dangerous barrier using barbed wire, or Mirror (2025), a grid-like structure devoid of any reflective function, which returns to the viewer not their own image, but the opacity of limitations.
Untitled (red velvet) (1996) presents a fragment of red velvet inscribed with a drawing reminiscent of intestines or lobes of the brain: a recurring motif in the artist’s work, exploring the body’s vulnerability and the fine line between attraction and repulsion.
The large Untitled (bed springs) I (2018) is a lithograph created by placing industrial bed springs directly onto lithographic stone. The result is a negative image, reminiscent of an X-ray, in which the regular grid geometry deforms into a biomorphic composition, suggesting a tension between structure and collapse.

Joining this core of works are new pieces produced for the exhibition during Hatoum’s residency at the Museo Nivola. Among these is the series of ceramic bird cages created with the artisanal workshop Terra Pintada, in which one of Hatoum’s recurring structural motifs returns: the grid as a form of containment, confinement, and control. Here, the use of ceramic—a fragile material tied to decorative tradition—introduces a visual and symbolic tension.
Also in ceramic are the forms of Gathering, resembling compressed blocks of earth that recall desolate landscapes, into which the artist has embedded old, rusted nails, like small human figures clustered into fragmentary communities. The elongated shapes and rough surfaces of the nails evoke the postwar sculptures of Giacometti, an artist with whom Hatoum has established a long-distance dialogue in a current exhibition at the Barbican in London.

Shooting Star I and II, with their spiky shapes suspended from the ceiling, appear like exploded geometry. Metallic rays converge in a dense and traumatic core, evoking both a celestial body and a detonating device. Created in collaboration with blacksmith Emanuele Ziranu, the work combines technical precision with visual brutality. The structures radiate force but also instability, and their presence in space—hanging, floating, threatening—acts as a point of perceptual tension.
Using traditional technique unique to Sardinia, weaver Mariantonia Urru has crafted a carpet entitled Eye Spy. The apparently random pattern is a translation of a pixelated image from a digital drone recording — an aerial view of a crowd— into a soft, tactile surface.
Wool, a warm and familiar material, paradoxically becomes the vehicle of a cold, detached vision typical of military or urban control technologies. The result is a carpet that does not comfort but disturbs: a visual device disguised as a domestic object, questioning our relationship with privacy, vulnerability, and the gaze of power.Many of the themes that characterise Hatoum’s work converge in the installation that gives the exhibition its title, Behind the Seen, an assemblage of everyday objects arranged in space with apparent casualness but charged with layers of meaning. A hospital bed, a colander bristling with spikes like a nail bomb, a tangle of metal wires, a rickety chair, a stuffed toy overturned under a table, a skinned soccer ball: each element evokes a scene, an interrupted experience. The very title suggests a double register: what is shown and what remains hidden, suppressed, invisible. It is a topography of the domestic unconscious, a fragmented interior that interrogates our relationship with inhabited space, trauma, and memory.