Last Updated on September 4, 2025
The Barbican Hosts Encounters: Giacometti X Mona Hatoum
5.0 out of 5.0 stars
A fleeting sense of serenity on entering the Barbican’s second-floor gallery, with its clean lines and neat, sparsely populated exhibition space bathed in natural daylight, soon gives way to disquiet.
The multidisciplinary artist Mona Hatoum is not given to bombast; yet the stark simplicity of her work never fails to speak volumes, and here it acquires yet another dimension when set against pieces by the Swiss Surrealist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), chosen and displayed by herself.
Giacometti X Mona Hatoum is the second in the Barbican’s trilogy of exhibitions, Encounters: Giacometti, that matches the practices of three contemporary artists against historic works by Giacometti. The first contemporary artist in the series was Huma Bhabha, and the third and final is Lynda Benglis, coming in February 2026.
Giacometti is one of the most significant European sculptors of the 20th century; his readily recognisable streamlined, elongated, fragile figures are largely a response to the devastation of World War II. And this is where his work meets that of Mona Hatoum, who was born in Lebanon to a displaced Palestinian family in 1952. Hatoum has been based in Britain, where she studied art, for many years, but inevitably her work, too, is permeated by the effects of war and devastation.
That becomes clear if you take a closer look at Interior Landscape, for example.
Installed in a stark cell-like room, it contains the frame of a bed, the springs of which are made of barbed wire, a bedside table on which sits a greasy cardboard food tray, and hanging on the wall a carrier bag and a distorted clothes hanger. Look closer still, and you’ll find a map of historic Palestine outlined in the grease stains of the food tray; embroidered in human hair on the pillow, portrayed in the distorted shape of the clothes hanger and printed on the shopping bag.
Mona Hatoum created Interior Landscape during a month-long residency in Amman, Jordan, a city with a significant Palestinian population.
Across from Interior Landscape there sits Giacometti’s small sculpture of a man walking between two houses; walking people became an experimental post-war theme for the sculptor, one that he would reprise in his never realised 1959 Project for the Chase Manhattan Plaza: Walking Man, Standing Woman, Head on Base.
With its all too-poignant allusion to displacement and permanent wandering in search of a homeland, walking is a theme that Mona Hatoum picked up in her her 1985 performance Roadworks, where she slowly walked barefoot through Brixton with a pair of large Doc Martens boots strapped to her ankles. A film of her painfully slow progress is on show in the exhibition.
Elsewhere the works of the two artists not only run parallel, but collide. It’s the case with Giacometti’s The Nose, which Hatoum removed from its original setting and encased in her own The Cube. Giacometti’s piece has an overlarge pointed nose sticking out of a face that is collapsing in on itself, the mouth open in a rictus of fear and death. Hatoum’s The Cube is made using an ancient wrought iron interlacing technique for barring windows in medieval buildings. It is, in fact, a cage with no entrance or exit where The Nose finds itself trapped. The cage is a recurring theme for both artists – alone each piece has its own power; together they weave a whole new narrative.
Individual works also come together in a display case where Hatoum combines small scale pieces by herself and by Giacometti. His Chase Manhattan Plaza project sits alongside a number of blood-chilling pieces created by Hatoum, for example, a baby doll sitting in an egg slicer, a bar of soap made in Palestine stuck through with pins, and a miniature meat mincer, its symbolism scarily obvious.
Inspired by a wardrobe in Giacometti’s studio, Hatoum created a cabinet containing a number of sculptures that allude to a hurt body, among them a glass tile with a relief of a disembodied child’s arm. This she pairs with a true Giacometti curiosity – The Cat, one of only three animal pieces ever created by the sculptor.
A sparse exhibition, Encounters: Giacometti X Mona Hatoum can be seen in a relatively short time, but it will stay with you for a long time afterwards. Its power derives not only from the individual works themselves with their emotional and historical charge, but from the way in which it clearly attests to the continuum of art over the centuries and how seemingly disparate artists can be made to enter a harmonious and mutually enlightening dialogue.
Mona Hatoum Encounters: Giacometti runs at the Barbican (Level 2) 3 Sept 2025 – 11 Jan 2026
Level 2
Barbican Centre
Silk Street, London
EC2Y 8DS
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