SAINT LOUIS, MO.- The Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma, the first major U.S. exhibition of Hatoum's work in over 20 years. Organized by the Menil Collection, in Houston, Texas, where it was on view earlier this year, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma includes more than 30 sculptures and installations by the London-based Hatoum (b. 1952), installed throughout the Pulitzer galleries.
Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma is on view from April 6 through August 11, 2018, at the Pulitzer, the exhibition’s final venue. The exhibition was curated by Michelle White, Senior Curator at the Menil Collection; the Pulitzer Arts Foundation presentation is organized by Curator Tamara H. Schenkenberg.
Hatoum creates work that evokes the growing unease of a world that seems ever-expanding and as technologically networked as it is politically fractured by war and exile. Since the late 1980s, her sculptures and installations have been grounded in questions about how shifting geography and institutional structures can redefine our understanding of “home,” as she investigates place and the body through a minimalist language of form and a wide range of materials, from glass and steel to light and sand.
Pulitzer Director Cara Starke states, “Mona Hatoum is one of the most important international artists of our day, and we are delighted to collaborate with the Menil Collection to bring her work to St. Louis. With a thoughtful and poetic use of form and material, Hatoum offers nuanced perspectives on universal human questions. Probing ideas of home, borders, and political upheaval, her practice is particularly relevant to our contemporary moment of global migration, displacement, and political uncertainty.”
At the Menil Collection, Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma was realized through the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; National Endowment for the Arts; the Levant Foundation; the Brown Foundation, Inc. / Herman L. Stude; Leslie and Brad Bucher; Bettie Cartwright; Day for Night; Nijad and Zeina Fares; Scott and Judy Nyquist; Clare Casademont and Michael Metz; Adelaide de Menil; Franci Neely; Leslie and Shannon Sasser; Anne Schlumberger; and the City of Houston.
Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Hatoum studied at the Byam Shaw and the Slade Schools of Art in London, where she settled after having been stranded because of the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 while on a short visit to the city. Over the past 40 years, her work has been presented in major exhibitions around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, among other institutions. Hatoum was nominated for the 1995 Turner Prize and has been included in important group exhibitions such as Documenta, Kassel, in 2002 and 2017, and the 1995 and 2005 Venice Biennales. In 2011, Hatoum was awarded the Joan Miró Prize by Fundacio Joan Miró.
