Mona Hatoum Encounters: Giacometti at the Barbican
Who doesn’t know the spindly figures of Giacometti? The bronze man with the impossibly long nose, the anonymous Walking Man, a shadow of a soul merely passing by. Giacometti is one of those artists who has ascended so completely into the mythology of 20th-century art that to see his sculptures anew can feel almost impossible. Which is why it is refreshing to be invited to meet him again, not directly, but refracted through the vision of another artist. At the Barbican, the second of three exhibitions in the series Encounters: Giacometti offers precisely this: a dialogue between Giacometti and a contemporary artist. This time, the interlocutor is Mona Hatoum.
The works on view stretch across almost a century, encompassing plaster, bronze, steel and glass, along with installations, video and works on paper. They unfold in several rooms suffused with the particular light that pours through the Barbican’s large windows, a cool and architectural glow. Hatoum was born in 1952; Giacometti died in 1966. Their lifespans did not overlap, yet the show, by placing their works side by side, proposes a conversation across time.
Hatoum’s story is inseparable from politics and displacement. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, she moved to London in 1975 after the Lebanese Civil War broke out, unable to return home. Her art has long investigated the psychic toll of instability and the way war and conflict infiltrate domestic life. This exhibition makes that clear from the very first moment. At the entrance stand several large-scale sculptures. One, Bourj, takes the form of stacked steel boxes resembling an apartment block, but scarred by holes that suggest drone strikes or missile fire. It is a relic of human life blasted into absence. The resonance with today’s news imagery is immediate and almost unbearable.
Nearby, two globes take their place: Orbital and Inside Out, both variations on a recurring motif in Hatoum’s work. Orbital is a skeletal globe sprouting clumps of concrete rubble, as though assembled from the detritus of demolished cities, a planet locked in perpetual destruction. Inside Out is its visceral counterpoint, its surface covered in entrail-like patterns, as if the world had turned itself inside out, vomiting its organs in order to reveal the nature of man: a species that bombs children, that erases lives in an instant.
Pairing Hatoum with Giacometti is a masterstroke. Their works not only hold together, they amplify one another. Giacometti was himself marked by war. He spent the Second World War in Geneva, returning to Paris to develop the elongated, fragile figures that came to symbolise postwar humanity: bodies as emblems of isolation, fragility and collective trauma. In this exhibition, one often finds oneself pausing before a piece, uncertain whether it belongs to Giacometti or Hatoum. Their dialogue is rooted in darkness, in the aesthetics of ruin and vulnerability.
Consider Hatoum’s cot fashioned from iron bars. It resembles a prison, stripped of its bottom and emptied of the baby it should cradle. Just beside it sits Giacometti’s brutal Woman with Her Throat Cut, a body sprawled on the floor, opened like an anatomical model, part insect, part cadaver, with a long exposed oesophagus and a head ending in a tiny screaming face.
The world, through these artists’ eyes, tilts toward the grotesque and the carnivalesque. Hatoum presents A Bigger Splash, borrowing Hockney’s title but rendering it in six enormous splashes of blood-red Murano glass. Not far away stands Giacometti’s iconic The Nose (1947), a macabre skull suspended on a stick, clownish and horrific. Here, it hangs within Hatoum’s Cube, a cage-like structure of steel bars. The effect is unmistakable: the human condition, trapped and surveilled, caught between claustrophobic grids.
The Barbican proves an apt setting. Its concrete shell, severe and monochrome, underscores the brutalist affinities of both Giacometti and Hatoum. Against this backdrop, their works appear as dispatches from the same battlefield. The timing, too, feels deliberate. Moving through the exhibition, it is difficult not to think of the images that crowd today’s news: the endless cycles of collapse, climate catastrophe, and wars without end. Though separated by nearly a century, Hatoum and Giacometti are joined by their ability to reveal what is still so urgent and unresolved: the darkness of the world. They slice open its surface, drag the entrails into view, and demand that we confront them. What is exposed, inevitably, is ourselves.
Standard admission is £8, and you get to hang out in the Barbican, which is objectively one of the coolest buildings in London. Do not miss this exhibition.
Constance Ayrton
Image: Caption: Encounters Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Installation view, Level 2 Gallery © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery
Mona Hatoum Encounters: Giacometti is at the Barbican from 3rd September 2025 until 11th January 2026. For further information or to book, visit the exhibition’s website here.
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