The curatorial essay and interview with the artist by Chiara Bertola, as Edward Said text, are part of the exhibition catalog. Available at Proa: libreria@proa.org
- Interview with Mona Hatoum (fragment)
by Chiara Bertola.
- Mona Hatoum: Unstable, Living, Organic and Moving Forms (fragment)
by Chiara Bertola.
- The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcileables (fragment)
by Edward Saïd.
Interview with Mona Hatoum (fragment)
by Chiara Bertola.
I am curious to know when you had the first realisation, as a child, that you might become an artist. And, in particular, how the culture of your native country has influenced, encouraged or hindered that initial decision.
All I know is that when I was a child I enjoyed drawing and doing crafty things, but I can’t really say that I had a clear idea of what being an artist meant, or of taking up art as a profession. There were no role models in my family. I had a cousin who was an amateur painter and another who was a piano player but they did not take it up professionally.
I have very happy and vivid memories of my first year at school - actually it was kindergarten - because there were a lot of creative activities: drawing, colouring, “picage”, “collage” and “tissage” with strips of colourful paper. Otherwise, throughout my school years, art was not even on the curriculum. The only subjects that gave me the opportunity to draw were science classes where we could make anatomical or botanical drawings and geography lessons where we could draw maps. Otherwise, I just had to sit out all those years of schooling and wait impatiently to grow up and get on with my own thing. So it came as a huge disappointment when, in my early teens, I revealed my ambition to study art to my father and he was totally against it. He was about to retire from his job at the British Embassy and was concerned about how to support his three daughters, so he wanted me to study something that would guarantee me a job so that I would be able to support myself. As a compromise, I decided to do a two-year graphic design course at Beirut University College and graduated in 1972. Before I finished my degree, I managed to get a job in a public relations office and then in the creative department of a large American advertising agency but I wasn't happy there and didn’t last very long. In 1975 I decided to quit my job and go back to Beirut University College to study for a BA in Fine Arts. I was planning to support myself through freelance design work. Having worked for about 3 years non-stop without a break, I decided to go on a little holiday to London. I also had vague plans to make a short visit to Paris too where a cousin of mine was living at the time. This was my very first trip to Europe and I wanted to see as much as I could. But a few days after I arrived in London the civil war erupted in Lebanon. Beirut airport immediately shut down and remained closed for the next 9 months. Since I was stranded in London and had a British Passport, I decided to stay put. I started looking for a job straight away but when people heard about my ambition to study art, I was advised to enrol on a foundation course at a private school, the Byam Shaw School of Art, as it was too late to go through the application procedure for any of the state schools. I thought I would do the foundation year while waiting for things to calm down back home. They didn’t calm down for 15 years so I continued my studies in London and ended up living there. It is difficult to say how the culture I grew up in has influenced my decision to become an artist, other than to say that it is a visually rich and sensual culture and there was a very lively art scene in the early to mid-70s with so many new and young galleries showing contemporary art in Beirut. The only thing that hindered me from pursuing my ambition to go to art school at that time was my family’s financial situation. I had to wait for five years before I was able to achieve this ambition and I was able to do it on my own and without any help from my family.
What was your family like and how was your childhood during those turbulent times?
I come from a Palestinian family that has had to live with the trauma of displacement and the loss of their home. In 1948, as the fighting got close to the coastal city of Haifa where my parents lived, they fled to Lebanon where they normally spent their summer break. They were never able to return. My father, Joseph, was originally from Nazareth and my mother, Claire, from Acre. After finishing his studies in Cairo, my father took up various jobs in the port of Haifa where his father owned some grain silos. Palestine was under the British Mandate and my father gradually worked his way up to the highest position an Arab could reach as the director of customs, second in command to the British officer. When my parents ended up in Lebanon, my father, having worked as a civil servant for the British Government in Palestine, was offered a job at the British Embassy in Beirut where he worked for the rest of his working life. When the Palestinian identity papers became invalid after Israel was created, my father was given the opportunity to become naturalised British in 1949. I was born in Beirut a few years later and was the youngest of three daughters. My parents wanted a boy and, despite the fact that their wish wasn't granted, I ended up with the name “Mona” which means “wish” in Arabic.
Mona Hatoum: Unstable, Living, Organic and Moving Forms (fragment)
by Chiara Bertola.
One day, while I was wandering with Mona Hatoum around a storehouse full of old glass objects in Murano (Venice), I realized that for this artist, aesthetic experience is integral to everyday life. Her work is so caught up in the mesh of her experience, of what she sees and does on a daily basis, that it cannot be separated from activities in her daily existence. It is bound up with life, with all its implications of wonder, amazement, irony and intimacy, but also rooted in an awareness of conflict and violence, of nomadism and personal freedom being taken away.
I am briefly going to examine Hatoum's career and attempt to identify and define the range of forms she has used to express the key conceptual threads in her work. I would like to start with the performance and video works that she made in the 1980s, where she used her own body as a means to examine ideas of confinement and invisibility. She no longer saw the human body as the arena of an artistic operation, as was the case with much performance work from the 1960s, loosely termed ‘Body Art’, but rather as a biological boundary and also as a place of protest and provocation. Feminist ideas, notions of rebellion, political reflection and language were all incorporated into her performances that can be seen as a formal reaction to the minimalist experiences of those earlier years.
In this essay, I would like to emphasise the vital, organic, mutable and positive dimension that characterizes Hatoum’s work, something that is often overshadowed and concealed by the pertinent themes of threat, claustrophobia, loss and isolation that have usually been identified as forming the epistemological core of her work.
[…]
Hatoum belongs to a generation of international artists whose works defamiliarise everyday forms, taking them on a conceptual journey that is quite different to one that we might expect. I am thinking of the environments created by an artist like Robert Gober in which there is always something disquieting, where everyday things are turned into strange and frightening objects; or of Felix Gonzales Torres’ work who, like Hatoum, made use of something close to a minimalist aesthetic that was ‘contaminated’ on each occasion by a social significance and a subversive content. Thus Hatoum is going down a road of ‘perceptual perturbation’ using a form of minimalism that does not accept mere formal self-referentiality but which is a language all her own. It is an elastic language, one that allows several levels to interact with themselves, a language that operates “between formal rigour, conceptual subtlety and political awareness”.
[…]
Hatoum tackles the domestic setting and the concept of home, bringing something foreign into it. She is perhaps most well-known for her striking sculptures which reproduce innocuous kitchen utensils – graters, colanders, egg-slicers and vegetable choppers, for example – on a gigantic scale, turning them into threatening and monstrous objects if not instruments of torture. Most critics seem to interpret them as objects that point to the inherent cruelty in daily routines or in the imposition of domestic life. I, however, prefer to see them relating to a ‘surreal’ thread which begins with Duchamp’s ready-mades and one that brings perturbation into the field of phenomenality.
[…]
I prefer to see the visionary side of these works, then, and to interpret the artist’s amazement, every time she encounters an object used for cooking, as that of a nomadic, unsettled woman, who is contemporary and un-domestic, who recognizes neither things nor functions in the kitchen. And I am comforted to read what Hatoum had to say about this in an interview: “I see kitchen utensils as exotic objects, and I often don’t know what their proper use is. I respond to them as beautiful objects. Being raised in a culture where women have to be taught the art of cooking as part of the process of being primed for marriage, I had an antagonistic attitude to all of that. Spending any time in the kitchen is something I resisted [...]”
[…]
Hatoum has a special ability to see the structure of things, the architecture that supports and constitutes them and of conveying the crux of their ‘meaning’. Every time, she seems to be able to show us the essentiality of things through her work. This is why I prefer to interpret the various versions of her metal structures more as ‘architectures’, frameworks of construction, rather than just seeing them as cages. In my view, they look more like skeletons – empty frames – that reveal the essence of a system, of a form, as happens, for instance, in the extraordinary synthesis that is Globe. A large metal sculpture that represents and describes better than any other image the working of the contemporary world, based on a single and unique structure of communication that holds it together: the web. A communication that, in the end, threatens to control and put under surveillance the entire globe.
[…]
The large video installation Janela (2014), which spreads along half of the side wall, determines the sensation that all the works exhibited in that room – new versions of earlier works and new site-specific installations – are part of a single story. It consists of an external video camera that captures in real time everything happening on the street outside the gallery, while projecting the images inside. The street, with its noises, passers-by and energy pervades the interior museum space, inevitably opening it up to the outside, forcing the works into interacting and resonating inside. Thus the artist installs a close relationship between the interior and the exterior, linking the suspended and fossilised time of the museum to the vital and rhythmic one of the city. Inevitably, our perception of the individual works also changes.
[…]
The entire room is suddenly full of stories, evolving through the collision of the external and internal, real and imaginary, public and private, rational and dream, micro and macro. The artist has thus created the conditions in which a work opens beyond a limit, beyond a window and enters a landscape in which other things happen; the depiction of a limit but also the possibility of it being surpassed.
To one side of the central room is a major installation that Hatoum has made especially for the exhibition. This work, entitled Sonhando acordado (2014), was made in São Paolo in collaboration with ACTC, an organisation that helps and assists mothers of children with heart problems who are being treated at the hospital in São Paulo. Frequently from working class or poor origins, from all over Brazil, the ACTC organisation provides them with somewhere to stay near the hospital where their child is undergoing treatment. As part of this charity support, they are taught embroidery to help keep their minds occupied during this difficult time, and to provide them with a way of earning some money. Hatoum asked these women to tell her their desires and dreams. But when she asked them to embroider them onto pillow cases, above all she wanted to give them a chance, in their demanding situation, to focus on themselves; to be able to wish for something they want. Some of them began to write their dreams, turning them into a story, whilst others decided to draw them. In this way, each woman’s story has set something in motion, pushing her life beyond the restrictions imposed on it from looking after a seriously sick child. This time, the women had the possibility of establishing their own story through a creative gesture – first drawing and then embroidering – opening up their own existence.
[…]
Like many of Hatoum's installations, in this work we find ourselves before an ambiguous and highly critical complexity, which manages to unite in a single image both the loss and the reconstruction of place through desire and dream.
[…]
The experience of seeing one of Hatoum’s works is always twofold: before discovering the harshness of the truth, there is almost always an initial moment of welcoming, a familiar and reassuring dimension that attracts or makes us smile. I can think of other works in this exhibition that work within this ambivalent dynamic. In Over My Dead Body (1988-2002), for example, a billboard-sized poster shows the profile of the artist looking at a toy soldier positioned on her nose. The irony of the image is strong and dominating: Hatoum’s stern gaze renders war irrefutably ridiculous, small and useless. The little soldier under the artist’s gaze is no more annoying than a fly. But to rectify this initial view are some words that weigh as heavy as a rock: “you will pass over my dead body”, an unequivocal line for many people who experience conflict and oppression.
[…]
This major survey of Hatoum's work in the Fondacion Proa does not follow a chronological order but rather a series of unexpected juxtapositions within her work. In this way, each work echoes the complexity with which the artist manages to challenge and, at times, disturb our experience of the ordinary.
The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcileables (fragment)
by Edward Saïd.
Consider the door handle’s place as you stand before the entrance to a room. You know that as you reach forward, your hand will move unerringly to one side or another of the door. But then you don’t encounter the handle, curl your fingers around it, and push forward because... it has actually been placed two feet above your head in the middle of the door, perched intransigently up there where it eludes your ready grasp, cannot fulfill its normal function, and does not announce what it is doing there. From that beginning dislocation others necessarily follow. The door may be pushed open on only one of its hinges. You must therefore enter the room sideways and at an angle but only after your coat or skirt is caught and torn by a nail designed to do that every time the room is entered. Inside, you come upon a carpet of undulating curves, which on close examination reveal themselves to be intestines frozen into plastic stillness. The kitchen to your right is barred by minuscule steel wires strung across the door, preventing entrance. Gazing through those wires you see a table covered with colanders, large metal spoons, grinders, sifters, squeezers and egg beaters, connected to each other by a wire that ends up connected to a buzzing light-bulb that flutters off and on disturbingly at random intervals. A bed in the left corner is without a mattress, its legs akilter in a grotesque rubbery wilt. A mysterious tracing of white powder forms a strange symmetrical pattern on the floor beneath the bare metal springs of a baby's crib next to it. The television set intones a scramble of jumbled discursive sounds, while a camera imperturbably emits animated images of an unknown person’s innards. All this is designed to recall and disturb at the same time.
Whatever else this room may be, it is certainly not meant to be lived in, although it seems deliberately, and perhaps even perversely to insist that it once was intended for that purpose: a home, or a place where one might have felt in place, at ease and at rest, surrounded by the ordinary objects which together constitute the feeling, if not the actual state, of being at home. Next door, we find a huge grid of metal bunks, multiplied so grotesquely as to banish even the idea of rest, much less actual sleep. In another room, the notion of storage is blocked by dozens
of what look like empty lockers sealed into themselves by wire mesh, yet garishly illuminated by naked bulbs.
An abiding locale is no longer possible in the world of Mona Hatoum’s art which, like the strangely awry rooms she introduces us into, articulates so fundamental a dislocation as to assault not only one’s memory of what once was, but how logical and possible, how close and yet so distant from the original abode, this new elaboration of familiar space and objects really is. Familiarity and strangeness are locked together in the oddest way, adjacent and irreconcilable at the same time. For not only does one feel that one cannot return to the way things were, but there also is a sense of just how acceptable and 'normal' these oddly distorted objects have become, just because they remain very close to what they have left behind. Beds still look like beds, for instance, and a wheelchair most definitely resembles a wheelchair: it is just that the bed’s springs are unusably bare, or that the wheelchair leans forward as if it is about to tip over, while its handles have been transformed either into a pair of sharp knives or serrated, unwelcoming edges. Domesticity is thus transformed into a series of menacing and radically inhospitable objects whose new and presumably non-domestic use is waiting to be defined. They are unredeemed things whose distortions cannot be sent back for correction or reworking, since the old address is unreachably there and yet has been annulled.
[…]
CV Mona Hatoum
Born Beirut, Lebanon, in 1952.
1975-1979 The Byam Shaw School of Art, London.
1979-1981 The Slade School of Art, London.
Lives and works in London and Berlin.
Solo exhibitions
1983 The Negotiating Table, SAW Gallery, Ottawa; N.A.C., St. Catherines; The Western Front, Vancouver (performance)
1984 The Negotiating Table, The Franklin Furnace, New York (performance)
Variation on Discord and Divisions, ABC No Rio, New York; A.K.A., Saskatoon; The Western Front, Vancouver; Articule, Montréal (performance)
1985 Between the Lines, The Orchard Gallery, Derry (performance)
1989 The Light at the End, The Showroom, London and Oboro Gallery, Montréal
1992 Mona Hatoum, Mario Flecha Gallery, London
Dissected Space, Chapter, Cardiff
1993 Recent Work, Arnolfini, Bristol
Socle du monde, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
1994 Mona Hatoum, Galerie René Blouin, Montréal
Mona Hatoum, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Mona Hatoum, C.R.G. Art Incorporated, New York
1995 Socle du monde, White Cube, London
Short Space, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Mona Hatoum, The British School at Rome, Rome
1996 Mona Hatoum, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mona Hatoum, Anadiel Gallery, Jerusalem
Current Disturbance, Capp Street Project, San Francisco
Quarters, Viafarini, Milan
Mona Hatoum, De Appel, Amsterdam
1997 Mona Hatoum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
Mona Hatoum, Galerie René Blouin, Montréal
1998 Mona Hatoum, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Mona Hatoum, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
1999 Mona Hatoum, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin
Mona Hatoum, The Box, Turin
Mona Hatoum, ArtPace Foundation for Contemporary Art, San Antonio, Texas
Mona Hatoum, Le Creux de l’Enfer, Centre d'art contemporain, Thiers, France
Mona Hatoum, Alexander and Bonin, New York
2000 Mona Hatoum,Le Collège, Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France and MuHKA - Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst , Antwerp, Belgium
Mona Hatoum, The Entire World as a Foreign Land, Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, London
Images from Elsewhere, fig-1, London
Mona Hatoum, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico
2001 Domestic Disturbance, Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachussets
Mona Hatoum, Sala Mendoza, Caracas
2002 Mona Hatoum, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City
Huis Clos, CASA - Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain (permanent Installation)
Grater Divide, White Cube, London
Mona Hatoum, CASA - Centro de Arte de Salamanca and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Mona Hatoum, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Mona Hatoum, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm
2003 Mona Hatoum, MACO - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca and Ex-Convento de Conkal, Yukatan, Mexico
Mona Hatoum: Photo and video works, Uppsala Konstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden
2004 Mona Hatoum - A Major Survey, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Kunst Museum Bonn and Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm
Mona Hatoum, Galerie René Blouin, Montréal, Canada
2005 Mona Hatoum: OVER MY DEAD BODY, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Australia
Mobile Home, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Mona Hatoum, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon
Mona Hatoum, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy
Hot Spot, White Cube (Mason’s Yard), London
2008 Mona Hatoum, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Undercurrents, XIII Biennale Donna, Palazzo Massari PAC, Ferrara
Unhomely, Galerie Max Hetzler Temporary, Osramhöfe, Berlin
Hanging Garden, daadgalerie, Berlin
Present Tense, Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London
Mona Hatoum, Darat al Funun – The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, Jordan
2009 Mona Hatoum, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Measures of Entanglement, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing
Hanging Garden, Kunsthalle Wien, public space Karlsplatz, Vienna
Interior Landscape, Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
Undercurrent (red), Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy
Mona Hatoum, Fondazione Merz, Turin
Mona Hatoum, Collected Works, Rennie Collection at Wing Sang, Vancouver
2010 Mona Hatoum, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Suspendu, MAC/VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France
Witness, Beirut Art Center, Beirut
Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2010 Mona Hatoum, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Electrified, 44 Møen, Denmark
Le Grand Monde, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain
Keeping it Real: An Exhibition in 4 Acts: Act 3: Current Disturbance, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
2011 Silver Lining, permanent installation at Hohschule der Künste Bern, Switzerland
Bunker, White Cube, London
Bourj, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Mona Hatoum, Sammlung Goetz, Munich
2012 You Are Still Here, Arter, Istanbul
Projection, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
Shift, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
2013 Mappings, Centre d’art des Pénitents noirs, Aubagne, France
A Body of Work, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano
Mona Hatoum, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Reflection, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
2014
Turbulence, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
Twelve Windows, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Mona Hatoum, Galerie René Blouin, Montréal
Close Quarters, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent
Mona Hatoum, Estação Pinacoteca - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
2015 Mona Hatoum: Twelve Windows, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Mona Hatoum, Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires
Mona Hatoum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Selection of Group Exhibitions from 1989
1980 Five Days at Battersea, Battersea Arts Centre, London (performance)
Summer Show '80, London Film Makers Co-op, London (performance)
1981 Gender Views, London Film Makers Co-op, London (performance)
New Contemporaries '81, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (performance)
Basement Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (performance)
Summer Show '81, London Film Makers Co-op, London
1982 Women Live, London Film Makers Co-op, London (performance)
Reflections, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (performance)
1983 Bridewell Studios, Liverpool (performance)
The Radiator, Manchester (performance)
Blind Dates, The Blackie, Liverpool (performance)
Wiencouver IV, The Western Front, Vancouver (Slowscan satellite exchange between Vienna and Vancouver)
1984 2nd International Festival of Performance, South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, Berkshire
Womens Performance, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale
1985 Dazzling Phrases, Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario; The Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario (performance)
Real Time, Audio Arts, ICA, London (performance)
Roadworks, a series of performances in the streets of Brixton, London
Art and Research Exchange, Belfast
1986 New Work, Newcastle '86, Projects UK, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (performance)
On Target, Live Video, Time Based Arts, Amsterdam (performance)
Streets Alive, Performance Festival in the streets of Sheffield (performance)
Identity/Desire, Representing the Body, Scottish Arts Council, Collins Gallery, Glasgow;
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum, Aberdeen; Crawford Centre of the Arts, St. Andrews and Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Conceptual Clothing, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (and tour)
1987 Chisenhale Dance Space, London (performance)
At the Edge, Air Gallery, London
Figures, Cambridge Darkroom, Cambridge; Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes; The Arts Centre, Darlington (performance)
Confrontations: The Role of Controversy in Art, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; Cartwright Hall, Bradford and The Cornerhouse, Manchester
State of the Nation, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry
Trans-Positions, Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds
National Review of Live Art, Riverside Studios, London (performance)
New Work, No Definition, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (performance)
Siting Technology, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff
The Elusive Sign, British Avant-Garde Film and Video 1977-1987, Tate Gallery, London, (and international tour)
Dislocations, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (performance)
1988 The Essential Black Art, Chisenhale Gallery, London (and tour)
Nationalism: Women and the State, A Space, Toronto
Siting Technology, Mc Kenzie Art Gallery, Regina
Metro Billboard Project '88, Projects UK, Newcastle upon Tyne (and tour)
EDGE '88, International Festival of Experimental Art, Clerkenwell, London
Installations, Cornerhouse, Manchester
Hi-Beam, Recent Film and Video for the Big Screen, Tate Gallery, London
32nd London Film Festival, London Film Makers Co-op, London
1989 Intimate Distance, The Photographers' Gallery, London (and tour)
Uprising, Artist's Space, New York
The Other Story, Hayward Gallery, London; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; Manchester City Art Gallery and Conerhouse, Manchester
1990 The British Art Show, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow; Leeds City Art Gallery and Hayward Gallery, London
TSWA Four Cities Project, New Art for Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne
Passages de l'image, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Video and Myth, MoMA, New York
1991 IV Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba
Interrogating Identity, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York (and US tour)
The Interrupted Life, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
1992 Pour la suite du Monde, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
Manifeste, 30 ans de création en perspective 1960-1990, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
1993 Four Rooms, Serpentine Gallery, London
Grazer Combustion, Steirischer Herbst '93 Festival, Graz
Eros, c'est la vie, Confort Moderne, Poitiers
1994 Espacios Fragmentados,V Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba
Sense and Sensibility: Women and Minimalism in the Nineties, MoMA, New York
Cocido y Crudo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Heart of Darkness, Kröller Müller, Otterlo, Holland
1995 ARS 95 Helsinki,Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
Identity and Alterity, 46th Venice Biennial, Italian Pavilion, Giardini, Venice
Rites of Passage, Tate Gallery, London
Fémininmasculin, le sexe de l'art, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
The Turner Prize 1995, Tate Gallery, London
Orient/ation, 4th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
1996 Inside the Visible, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (1997)
FremdKörper / Corps étranger / Foreign Body, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
Inklusion: Exklusion, Steirischer Herbst '96, Graz, Austria
Life/Live, La scène artistique au Royaume-Uni en 1996, de nouvelles aventures, Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris and Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon
1997 De-Genderism: détruire dit-elle/il, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo
Material Culture: The Object in British Art of the 80s and 90s, Hayward Gallery, London
Unmapping the Earth, Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea
Sensation: Young British Artists from The Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (1999)
Art from the UK, Sammlung Goetz, Munich
1998 Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Close Echoes, Public Body & Artificial Eye, City Art Gallery, Prague and Kunsthalle Krems, Czech Republic
Echolot, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel
Real/Life: New British Art, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Fukuoka City Art Museum; Hiroshima City Museum; Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art and Ashiya City Museum of Art History (1999)
Traversées / Crossings, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Minimal-Maximal, Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen; Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1999)
XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, Fundacao Biennial São Paulo
Emotion - Young British and American Artists from the Goetz Collection, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
7th International Cairo Biennale 1998, Cairo
1999 Looking for a Place, SITE Santa Fe's Third International Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico
La Casa, il Corpo, il Cuore, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna and the National Gallery, Prague (2000)
The Century of the Body, Photoworks 1900-2000, Culturgest, Lisbon and Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne (2000)
The XXth Century - one century of art in Germany, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Art Worlds in Dialogue - From Gauguin to the Global Present, Museum Ludwig, Cologne
2000 Sincerely Yours, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo
Friends and Neighbours, The 4th EV+A Biennial, Limerick City Gallery of Art , Limerick
Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Out There, White Cube2, London
Between Cinema and a Hard Place, Tate Modern, London
Orbis Terrarum, Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp
La forma del mondo/la fine del mondo, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan.
Vision and Reality, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
MAN-Body in Art from 1950-2000, Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, Skovvej, Denmark
No es sólo lo que ves: pervirtiendo el minimalismo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
2001 El Instante Eterno: arte y espiritualidad en el cambio de milenio / The Eternal Instant: Art and spirituality at the change of the millenium, Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló, Castelló, Spain
Field Day: Sculpture from Britain, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan
(Self) Portraits, Alexander and Bonin, New York
El Mundo Nuevo / The new world, Bienal de Valencia, Valencia, Spain
In weiter Ferne, so nah, neue palästinensische kunst, IFA-Galerie Bonn; IFA-Galerie Stuttgard and IFA-Galerie Berlin (2002)
Il Dono / The Gift, Palazzo delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena and Centro Cultural Candiani, Mestre
2002 Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany
Another World: 12 Bedroom Stories, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland
40 Jahre: Fluxus und Die Folgen, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany
The Benefit of Art: Postfeminist Positions from the Goetz Collection, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany
Sculpture, Alexander and Bonin, New York
Comer o no comer / To eat or not to eat, CASA - Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
2003 M_ARS - Art and War, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz, Austria
Micro/Macro: British Art, 1996-2002, Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary
Banquete. Metabolism and Communication, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Il Racconto del filo. Ricamo e cucito nell’ arte contemporanea, MART - Museo di Trento e Rovereto, Trent
©EUROPE EXISTS, MMCA - Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece
Migration, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
2004 Made in Mexico / Hecho en México, ICA, Boston
Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign; Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth, MA. and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (2005)
Das große Fressen - Von Pop bis heute, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany
Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Iran
Laoconte devorado: Arte Laocoon Devoured: Art and Political Violence, ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria - Gasteiz; Centro José Guerrero, Granada and Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca, Spain
Transcultures, EMST - National Museum of Contemporary art, Athens
Love it or Leave it, Cetinje Biennial V, Cetinje, Montenegro
Non Toccare la Donna Bianca - Arte Contemporanea fra diversità e liberazione, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Castel dell'Ovo Museum, Naples (2005)
2005 The Body. Art & Science, National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm
Works on Paper, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin,
Colour After Klein, Barbican Gallery, London
Always a little Further, 51st Venice Biennial, Arsenale di Venezia, Venice
Panopticon - The Architecture and Theatre of Prison, the Zacheta Gallery of Art, Warsaw
Fairy Tales Forever: Homage to H.C. Andersen, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum , Aarhus, Denmark
The real me, part of: London in Six Easy Steps: Six Curators, Six Weeks, Six Perspectives, ICA, London
Figures of Thinking: Convergences in Contemporary Cultures, Richard E. Peeler Art Centre, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN (and 5 venues tour till 2008)
On both sides of the Rhine – Movement, Ludwig Museum, Cologne
Guardami. Percezione del Video, Palazzo delle Papesse - Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena
2006 Kairotic, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo
Conversations = Hadith, Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut
Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, MoMA, New York
Around the World in Eighty Days, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Zones of Contact, 15th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney
Domestic Incidents, Tate Modern, London
Into Me/Out of Me, PS 1, NewYork and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Drei Farben - BLAU, XIII. Rohkunsbau, Groß Leuthen Castle, Groß Leuthen, Germany
Out of Time: Contemporary Art from the Collection, MoMA, New York
Super Vision, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Confini, Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro - MAN, Sardegna, Italy
D'ombra, Palazzo delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena,
Eye on Europe: Prints, Books & Multiples/1960 to Now. MoMA New York
Diagnosis [Art]: Contemporary Art Reflecting Medicine, Kunst museum Ahlen, Germany
Polemos, Fortezza Gavi, Gavi, Italy
2007 Turbulence: 3rd Auckland Triennial, Auckland, New Zealand
L’Emprise du Lieu, Domaine Pommery, Reims, France
STILL LIFE: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change, Sharjah Biennale 8, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
Mining Glass, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington
Capricci, Possibilités d’autres mondes, Casino Luxembourg- Forum d’art contemporain Luxembourg
Dialogues méditerranéens à Saint-Tropez, Parcours artistiques de l’été culturel 2007, La Citadelle Saint-Tropez
There is no border..., Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria
Neue Heimat, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
Timer 01. Intimità / Intimacy, Fondazione Triennale di Milano, Triennale Bovisa, Milan
2008 Genesis - The Art of Creation, Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Centre, London
The Morning After. Videoworks from the Goetz Collection, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany
Being Here. Mapping the Contemporary, BB3 - Bucharest Biennale 3, Bucharest, Romania
Ekko Echo Ecco, U-TURN Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen
Close-Up, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
The impossible Prison, the Police Station at the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham
Heavy Metal. On the inexplicable lightness of a material, Kunsthalle Zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany
Political/Minimal, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland (2009)
2009 The power of ornament, Orangerie, Lower Belvedere, Vienna
Accrochage, Galerie Max Hetzler Temporary, Berlin
Elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris
REBELLE, Art and Feminism 1969-2009, Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, The Netherlands
Glasstress,Collateral Event 53 Biennale di Venezia, Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti - Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, Venice
Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK
Medals of Dishonour,The British Museum, London
Taswir - Pictorial Mappings of Islam and Modernity, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Earth: Art of a changing world, GSK Contemporary 2009, Royal Academy of Arts/Museum of Mankind, London
Barock, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea DonnaREgina (MADRe), Naples, Italy
2010 The Visceral Body, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC
Poetry and Dream, Tate Modern, London
Everything is connected / tutto è connesso, Castello di Rivoli, Turin
Hope!, Palais des Arts et du Festival, Dinard, Brittany, France
The New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London and Garage Center of Contemporary Culture, Melnikov Gallery, Moscow
Yesterday Will Be Better, Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland
Terre Vulnerabili, HangarBicocca, Milan
On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, MoMA, New York
2011 The luminous Interval, The D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao
Beirut, Kunsthalle Wien project space karlsplatz, Vienna
Jean Genet, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), Istanbul
Erre, variations labyrinthiques, Centre Pompidou-Metz
Voyage en Orient, from Pierre Loti to Nan Goldin, Galerie d’art du conseil general des Bouches-du-Rhône, Aix-en-Provence
Dance/Draw, ICA Boston and tour
2012 Rasterfahndung, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart
Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, various venues, Mechelen, Belgium
The Unexpected Guest, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool
Merciless. Wit Irony Satire Sarcasm - Female artists and the Comical, Kunsthalle Vogelmann, Heilbronn
From Death to Death and Other Small Tales, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
2013 Ici, ailleurs / Here, elsewhere, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille
Fragile?, Le Stanze del Vetro (Fondazione Giorgio Cini), Venice
Material World, Denver Art Museum
Le pont, Musée d'Art Contemporain (MAC) Marseille
Drone. The Automated Image. Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 13. Darling Foundry, Montreal
More Light. The Fifth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow
Anatomy Lesson. From Rembrandt to Damien Hirst, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
Lasting Images, Guggenheim New York
Le Surréalisme et l'objet - La Sculpture au défi. Centre Pompidou
In Order to Join, Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
2014
lens-based sculpture. The Transformation of the Concept of Sculpture through Photography. Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg), Berlin (and tour)
Ravage. Kunst en erfgoed in tijden van conflict, M-Museum Leuven
La disparition des lucioles, Prison Saint-Anne, Avignon
Les désastres de la guerre. 1800-2014, Louvre-Lens, Pas-de-Calais
Mind the Map, Gallerie F15, Moss
Good Morning Mr. Orwell, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin-si
Ombra, Polvere e Una Promessa di Futuro (Shadow, Dust and a Promise of Future), Complesso di Sant'Agostino and Piazza Duomo, Pietrasanta (Lucca)
Signs against war. Anti-war sculpture from Lehmbruk until today, Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg
Mark the Line, Götteborgs Konsthall
Dead Reckoning: Whorled Explorations, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala
2015
SCHLAFLOS / SLEEPLESS - Beds in History and Contemporary Art, 21er Haus, Vienna
Arts & Foods, Triennale di Milano, Milan