Furniture as Sculptural vehicles: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum:
Encounters. Divide, 2025
Exhibition at Barbican
Encounters, Mona Hatoum’s joint exhibition with Alberto Giacometti at the Barbican, which I visited this September, transforms the gallery into a strange, unsettling domestic realm. Approaching the space as a total installation, Hatoum filled it with ruined furniture, cell-like rooms, and cage-like structures that elicit both intimacy and threat. Ambiguity and ambivalence replace comfort and familiarity with feelings of distress, disrupting expectations of what constitutes a home.
In Remains of the Day 2016-18, Hatoum presents the ghostly remnants of burnt wooden furniture, barely held together with wire mesh, resembling the aftermath of disaster. In Incommunicado 1993, a child’s cot strung with taut cheese wire turns a symbol of care into an object of danger. Similarly, in Interior Landscape 2008, domestic warmth is replaced by sterile entrapment: a cell-like room where a map of historical Palestine, embroidered in human hair, rests on a pillow beside a take-away food tray marked with grease stains forming a fragmented map. Across these works, Hatoum transforms the familiar into the uncanny, rendering domestic furniture into sculptural vehicles of memory, loss, and displacement.
While my own practice aims toward reflection rather than unease, I am deeply influenced by how Hatoum reconfigures domestic forms to embody emotion, tension, and memory. Her transformation of functional furniture into charged sculptural objects resonates with my exploration of how everyday furniture can be reimagined and activated as sites of emotional encounter, embodying time, care and the traces of lived experience.
In my work, I use materials such as charred pine and rusted mild steel to reimagine domestic furniture like kitchen tables and seats, as vessels of memory and belonging. I am drawn to both their symbolic meanings and the function they perform. In my Mother’s house, for example, the table was a central gathering point, a place to dine, learn and connect. Placed on wheels and rendered collapsible, I charged them with potential energy, as furniture-like sculptural vehicles that embody support, landscape, memory, and motion.
Fig.1: Mona Hatoum, Remains of the Day, 2016-18. Wire mesh and wood. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Barbican London, 2025.
Fig.2: Mona Hatoum, Incommunicado, 1993. Mild steel, wire and rubber. Installation view at Barbican London, 2025.
Fig.3: Mona Hatoum, Interior Landscape, 2008. Steel bed, pillow, human hair, bedside table, cardboard tray. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Barbican London, 2025.
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