Mona Hatoum’s practice (1952, Beirut), an artist of Palestinian origin, is profoundly interdisciplinary: over the years she has experimented with a wide range of media—from performance to photography, from video to installations—using them as tools to express complex ideas related to identity and the human condition. Her family background and the historical events that have marked Palestine played a decisive role in her artistic formation, deeply influencing her sensibility and visual language. In her works, the consequences of political and cultural conflicts often emerge: those mechanisms of tension and violence that shape society and that, in their most extreme forms, end up stripping individuals of their humanity and their roots.
The work Remains of the Day is an emblematic example of this approach. Hatoum recreates the essential elements of a domestic environment: a table, several chairs of different sizes, a stool, a rolling pin fallen to the floor, and a vintage toy truck. At first glance, what appears is the trace of everyday family life—a scene that could belong to any home. However, upon closer observation of the materials and their treatment, the reassuring dimension fades, revealing a much darker meaning.
The objects are made from a combination of metal mesh and dark wood. The structures appear reduced to mere skeletons, as if they had been charred by a fire that consumed their substance, leaving only the thin, skeletal outline of the mesh to suggest their original form. The carbonized wood—black, brittle, and extremely fragile—represents the remnants that survived the flames, fragments of a past crumbling before the viewer’s eyes. It is precisely this state of ruin that gives meaning to the work’s title: Remains of the Day.
Even the debris and particles scattered across the floor contribute to the sense of a traumatic event that has just occurred, a destruction that feels recent and still perceptible in the air. The viewer thus finds themselves immersed in an environment that simultaneously evokes presence and absence, memory and erasure.
Through this defaced domestic setting, Hatoum invites us to reflect on the fragility of the home, understood as a place of protection, intimacy, and continuity. She reminds us how what we consider stable and secure can suddenly transform into a hostile territory, a repository of painful or lost memories. Remains of the Day becomes a meditation on the precariousness of existence and on the violence that breaks into everyday life, erasing certainties and leaving behind only vulnerable traces destined to disappear.

Mona Hatoum, Remains of the Day, 2016-2018,
wire mesh and wood, dimensions variable.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Installation view, Level 2 Gallery
© Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery

29/11/25