Mona Hatoum Encounters: Giacometti, “Divide” at Barbican Center, London
‘The Nose', 1947 by Alberto Giacometti and ‘Cube', 2006 by Mona Hatoum, Encounters Giacometti x Mona Hatoum Installation view, Level 2 Gallery © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.
Author: Michela Ceruti
At the Barbican, “Divide” stages a fraught, almost claustrophobic encounter between Alberto Giacometti and Mona Hatoum, the second of three planned confrontations with the Swiss artist; the next ones include interactions with Huma Bhabha and Lynda Benglis. Hatoum, whose practice consists on the body as a political site – exiled, surveilled, vulnerable – meets Giacometti’s postwar figures, skeletal apparitions of alienation already carrying ash of history on their skins. The curatorial conceit is neat: two artists circling catastrophe, one in the rubble of Europe after 1945, the other in the long shadow of displacement and geopolitical violence of our present days. But neatness is both a virtue and a risk. When two languages of fragility are forced into a dialogue, the danger is that they begin to echo each other too loudly, amplifying the cage until it becomes intolerable.
The clang is literal: “Divide” returns again and again to the motif of enclosure, of the human form pressed against its limit. Sometimes the doubling is uncanny, as when Giacometti’s dangling The Nose (1947) swings inside Hatoum’s Cube(2006); a curatorial indulgence so precise it almost tips into parody. Yet even here, something unsettling happens. Giacometti once said that violence moves him most in sculpture, and Hatoum’s traps and lattices intensify that undercurrent very much so. The show even gestures back to Giacometti’s prewar work, particularly Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), a figure whose severed neck suggests both a human body violated, and, oddly, an insectoid form reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The insect as cage and existential trap: this tension between literal horror and metaphorical threads through the exhibition. In painting these works with Hatoum’s politically charged installations, “Divide” stages a dialogue about bodies under duress – fragile, exposed, constrained – where the horrors of history and the mechanisms of contemporary surveillance collide. What could feel didactic instead becomes strange, almost poetical resonance: figures that are at once alienated and animate, caught between past and present, corporeal and symbolic, intimate and geopolitical.
If the dialogue holds, it is because it is also about divergence. Both artists investigate the fragility of human existence, yet Giacometti insists on the continued, if spectral, presence of the body. His attenuated figures, stretched to the edge of recognition, are still human forms, witnesses to devastation yet stubbornly material. Hatoum, by contrast, works through absence: her installations evoke the body by subtracting it. What we encounter is the residue of a presence, the ghost of a figure that has already been removed, often violently so. In Incommunicado (1993), a child’s bed is turned into a menacing entrapment from steel wire; the body is implied, but missing; in Divide (2025), the titular work that lends the show its name, the screen barbed wire evokes the boundary as a wound, as a trace of lives kept out or locked in. The absence becomes just as anguishing as Giacometti’s skeletal presences, a negative form that resonates with the same intensity.
The motif of the cage, then, is doubled. Hatoum constructs cages literally, spaces designed to withhold or repel. Giacometti’s cage is more insidious: the body itself functioning as a prison, or as a stake. All of them are frameworks containing his figures, dramatizing alienation as much as confinement. The languages of both artists remind us that a cage is never only a physical structure, but also a psychological and historical creation.
“Divide” avoids collapsing into didacticism by holding this unstable balance: presence and absence, flesh and residue, figure and void. The exhibition demonstrates how art can register catastrophe without illustrating it, instead staging a space of reverberation where the past and present continually intersect. In the end, what remains with the viewer is a lingering unease, a resonance that affirms fragility not as a theme to be explained, but as the ground these works inhabit.
About the author: Michela Ceruti is a writer based in Milan. She is the managing editor of Flash Art Magazine.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Installation view, Level 2 Gallery © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Installation view, Level 2 Gallery © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, Installation view, Level 2 Gallery © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.