Courtesy of the artist Light Sentence, 1992 Mona Hatoum (Palestinian, born Lebanon, 1952) Wire mesh lockers, slow-moving motorized light bulb; 198 x 185 x 490 cm © Mona Hatoum A sculptor and performance artist, Mona Hatoum moved to London in 1975; she was unable to return to Lebanon, her native country, due to the outbreak of civil war. Hatoum became widely known for a series of performance and video works that challenged taboos by focusing on the demystification of the body and its hidden functions. In the 1990s, her work expanded into large-scale installations that engaged the viewer in paradoxical emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum formulated a language based on Minimalist sculpture and Conceptual art in which domestic items like chairs, beds, cots, and kitchen utensils are transformed into unfamiliar and threatening objects. Her work explores notions of exile and dislocation, of power and powerlessness, and of individual strength and vulnerability in the face of violence and fragmentation. In the interactive installation Light Sentence, the room becomes a reverential space for viewing coordinates of lines, spatial density, and restless patterns of light and dark at the same time that it becomes a place of enclosure, bodily orientation, and secure order. close window