Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma
Description
The work of London-based artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) addresses the growing unease of an ever-expanding world that is as technologically networked as it is fractured by war and exile. Best known for sculptures that transform domestic objects such as kitchen utensils or cribs into things strange and threatening, she conducts multilayered investigations of the body, politics, and gender that express a powerful and pervasive sense of precariousness. This copiously illustrated presentation of the artist’s oeuvre offers critical and art historical essays by Michelle White and Anna C. Chave and imaginative texts by Rebecca Solnit and Adania Shibli that contextualize Hatoum’s work as well as extensive discussions on a selection of significant sculptures and installations. Published in conjunction with the artist’s first major United States exhibition in twenty years, the publication features photographs of the show installed in the Menil Collection’s renowned Renzo Piano-designed building.
About the Authors
Michelle White is Senior Curator at the Menil Collection, Houston, where she recently curated exhibitions on Barnett Newman (2015), Lee Bontecou (2014), and Richard Serra (2011). She was a major contributor to all three associated catalogues.
Anna C. Chave is Professor Emerita of Art History at the Graduate Center CUNY. Over her more than thirty-year career she has contributed to exhibition catalogues on Lynda Benglis, Constantin Brancusi, Valeria Jaudon, and Pat Stier and to a number of additional publications.
Tamara Schenkenberg is Curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. She is the co-author of the forthcoming publication Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (2017).
Palestinian writer Adania Shibli is the author of the novels Touch (2010) and We are All Equally Far from Love (2012) and is the two-time winner of the Young Writers Award–Palestine.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, and hope and disaster, including The Mother of All Questions (2017), Men Explain Things to Me (2015), Hope in the Dark (2006), and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005).
