MONA HATOUM

White Cube Seoul is pleased to present Mona Hatoum’s first solo exhibition in South Korea, spanning two and a half decades of the artist’s practice and features over 20 key sculptures and works on paper.

March 6 – April 12, 2025

Hatoum’s work often transforms everyday items into sculptures that seem foreign, dangerous, even threatening. The earliest work in the exhibition, Untitled (wheelchair II) from 1999, exemplifies many of the foundational tenets of Hatoum’s sculptures; the appropriation of utensils or furniture to witty, often surreal effect, or the presencing of the absent body to hauntingly poetic ends. Hatoum’s stainless-steel wheelchair is stripped of comfort and has handles that have been modelled into blades, each broadly serrated to accommodate the grip of the hands. An instrument of care turned against the carer Hatoum has remarked on the work’s relationship to the proverbial notion of ‘biting the hand that feeds you’. An early work that speaks to the psychosocial currents preoccupying much of Hatoum’s work, Untitled (wheelchair II) gestures towards the infirm body and questions of institutional care.

Hatoum’s new work, Divide (2025), comprises a life-size, three-part hospital screen in which the usual cloth panels have been replaced by gridded, barbed wire. No longer a protective screen providing privacy, this intervention instead erects an exposing barrier that threatens to wound. A recurring motif in Hatoum’s oeuvre – the grid and fence structures granting access to sight but not touch – this hospital screen amplifies the cleave between those on either side of the divide.

The grid also forms the basis of Hatoum’s artwork Mirror (2025), a wall-mounted cage constructed from rebar. Contrary to its title, there is a distinct lack of reflective surface in Mirror; where the viewer may expect to see their own reflection, they are instead confronted with the gridded lattice that warps as they move around it. Furthering these notions of containment and witness – as well as their possible formal expression – Untitled (fence, mirrored) (2018) superimposes the likeness of a chain-link fence upon a reflective-coated paper.

Conveying the breadth of Hatoum’s groundbreaking, multidisciplinary artistic practice, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s long-standing concerns through a selection of new and historical works. Minimalist in aesthetic and poetic in nature, Hatoum’s work destabilises perceived certainties to expose the paradoxes and alternative narratives that underlie a seemingly familiar world.