Mona Hatoum Kiasma 07.10.2016 – 26.02.2017 Exhibion Review Donna Roberts It is not oſten that we might wish an arst’s work to have become less significant. Sadly, however, the contemporary horrors of the world stage connue to resonate deeply in the work of Mona Hatoum. Following its display in the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate, London, the exhibion of Hatoum’s work – the first solo show to be held in Finland - opens today in Kiasma, Helsinki. While not exactly billed as a retrospecve, the exhibion stages a stunning account of the range, depth, and longevity of Hatoum’s arsc engagement in some of the most distressing socio-polical issues of the last forty years. Hatoum’s visceral early performances of the 1980s, in which she explored the experience of conflict-driven diaspora, take on a renewed significance in this current climate of forced migraon from the Middle East. Hatoum’s background is full of the complexity that defines her arsc exploraon of identy. She was born in Beirut in 1952 to Palesnian parents from Haifa and travelled to Britain in 1975, shortly before the onset of civil war in Lebanon, which separated her from her family. Between 1979 and 1981 she studied at the Slade School of Art in London, the city where she sll resides, and yet has made much of her work in residencies across the globe, oſten ulising local tradional craſt methods in situ. Mobilised by intense cultural dislocaon, and the aggressive socio-polical meltdown taking place in late-70s Britain, Hatoum began to work with performance and video, taking advantage of the directness of the media to engage her audience and to arculate a profound sense of personal, social and cultural anxiety. She rose to prominence in the 1990s with works that were both formally and physically impressive as well as polically incisive, drawing on personal experience to address problems of migraon, displacement, racism, and the oppression of women. This exhibion shows the extent to which, twenty years on, Hatoum’s crique is sll razor sharp, her conceptual poignancy and material dexterity appearing stronger than ever. 1