Born to a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952, Mona Hatoum moved to London in 1975, shortly before war broke out in Lebanon. Exile and migration are both age-old and of keen relevance in Hatoum's work, as she explores the relationship between resilience and vulnerability of the human body, violence and oppression, expatriation and belongingness.

Hatoum perceives the body not merely as defined by its corporeal limits, but as existing within a social space and a cultural context, the complexities of which are manifested in the choice of materials and scale. Her art harnesses the tension between familiar and repulsive, poetic and political, personal and universal. Its richness and importance lies in this ambiguity.