The works of Beirut-born artist Mona Hatoum, who currently lives in London and Berlin, incorporate very real topics. Many of her sculptures deal with the conditions in the world’s crisis regions or of the exile; others show that familiar objects from everyday life can become very alien things. “Hatoum’s works appeal to the body as a common site of experience of scale, material, place and pain. So while they may be read specifically in terms of her own personal history and the extreme experience of alienation and instability that is the fate of the exile, they also refer to the themes of memory, home, movement, location and space that are part of everyone’s physical existence,” Kirsty Bell writes in her essay. Regardless of whether Hatoum works with barbed wire or sandbags or magnifies kitchen graters into man-sized sculptures, she always succeeds in turning a familiar object into something else, something eerie, something unhomely.

Unhomely is like a walk-through of the exhibition that Hatoum installed in the huge temporary showroom of Galerie Max Hetzler. Here, the artist’s central themes can be found, easily accessible as if on a track. The works enhance each other and give the artist’s creations a vivid presence. In her richly illustrated essay, Kirsty Bell retraces these themes: taking her cue from the exhibition’s most recent works, she surveys the artist’s complete oeuvre, finding maps and tracks, cubes and cages, and objects of conflict, both at home and abroad.

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In collaboration with Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin