During the upheaval of the early civil war months in Lebanon in 1975, Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) found herself stranded in London, where she decided to study art. In the early 1980s, she graduated from the Slade School of Art, where she immersed herself in postmodern thought and the concurrent development of critical theory in the United Kingdom. Inspired by artistic movements challenging the norms of contemporary British art, she shaped her artistic approach by blending the artistic, social, and political realms. The ideas of Rasheed Araeen gave her a conceptual framework, exploring his reflections on Third World art, postcolonialism, questions of identity, and the notion of “black artist” in the United Kingdom. This article aims to examine Hatoum’s involvement in British Black Arts through her activities with Rasheed Araeen, presenting a fresh analysis of key works that assess their critical impact. While she is now a globally recognized artist, there has been limited research dedicated to the phase of her life when she existed on the fringes of art history during her youth in Beirut, then working in the then-contested field of performance and video, and often being considered a migrant artist, or as she once wrote: a black one. Drawing from an exclusive interview with the artist, this article offers an intersectional approach to both western art history and that from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region, shedding new light on this crucial period in her artistic development and its broader implications for understanding diverse artistic narratives.
