Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Barbican, exhibition review: ‘Escape the headlines you will not’
Mona Hatoum’s Hot Spot (stand). Photograph: White Cube / Ollie Hammick
Her disembowelled bodies are finely crafted with elegant contours and fashionably muted colours. His jagged figures and dark tones echo themes of solitude and pain.
Mona Hatoum and Alberto Giacometti have been paired in the second of a series of exhibitions at the Barbican presenting the work of the sculptural luminary alongside that of 21st-century artists.
Giacometti’s The Nose, 1947. Photograph: Fondation Giacometti
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum meditates on the various ways the human form can come to harm.
Using a variety of media from bronze and Murano glass to her her own hair, the Lebanese-born Palestinian Hatoum catalogues the violence that has befallen the world in recent decades.
A child’s cot becomes an instrument of torture, a room-dividing screen menaces with barbed wire, dead bodies are woven into rugs, a plastic baby sits ready to be sliced.
Giacometti’s Woman with Her Throat Cut and The Cage evoke equally horrific motifs of a previous generation.
In a particularly innovative move, Hatoum has been allowed to edit the Italian’s sculptor’s 1947 work The Nose, removing the original square enclosure and replacing it with a far more sinister Cube wrought of steel latticework.
Hatoum’s Cube, 2006. Photograph: Phtgrphy Vancouver
Apocalypse alternates with post-apocalyptic ruins as you walk around the small Level 2 gallery.
Escape the headlines you will not, but grasp them on a deeper level you just might.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum runs until 11 January 2026 at the Barbican’s Level 2 gallery.