White Cube Seoul is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Korea by Mona Hatoum (b. 1952), featuring over 20 key works spanning over two decades of her groundbreaking, multidisciplinary practice.
Hatoum is renowned for her poetic and political works, from site-specific installations and sculpture, to video, photography and works on paper. She began her career in the 1980s making visceral video works and performances that focused intensely on the body. Since the early 1990s, she has created sculptures and large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of seduction and revulsion, fear and fascination.
With a minimalist aesthetic and poetic gestures, Hatoum often transforms familiar, everyday items such as chairs, cots or kitchen utensils, into sculptures that seem foreign, dangerous or even threatening.
In the White Cube Seoul exhibition, sculpture, installation and works on paper made between 1999 and the present day convey the breadth of Hatoum’s practice. The earliest work exhibited, Untitled (wheelchair II) (1999), comprises a stainless steel wheelchair with serrated knives for handles, subverting its function from an instrument of care to one that turns against the carer. In a new work, Divider (2025), a hospital room divider incorporates a grid of barbed wire in the place of soft fabric.
Other highlights from the exhibition include the installation Misbah (2006–07), titled after the Arabic word for ‘lantern’. In this work, silhouettes of soldiers –a recurring motif – are replicated as a decorative cut-out on a brass rotating lantern, creating ominous shadows marching across the gallery walls. Still Life (medical cabinet) VI (2025) features a medical cabinet with colourful, hand-blown glass grenades placed inside, ambiguously poised between something deadly and alluring.
Press release from White Cube
Image: Mona Hatoum. Misbah. 2006-2007. Brass lantern, metal chain, light bulb and rotating electric motor Lantern. 58 x 32 x 28.5 cm. © Mona Hatoum
