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Mona Hatoum
Shortlisted: 1995

Hatoum began making performance pieces in the early 1980s, but later moved from 'live' work to video, installation and sculpture. She has focused on confrontational themes such as violence, oppression and voyeurism, often making powerful reference to the vulnerability, and resistance, of the human body. She settled in London in 1975, after civil war broke out in Lebanon while she was visiting Britain. Her early work was interpreted in this light, as a metaphor for universal conflict and resistance to oppression.

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1952 and came to in London in 1975. She trained at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Art between 1975 and 1981. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995 for her exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and for her show at the White Cube.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Mona Hatoum in the Tate Collection