March 6, 2026

Giacometti x Hatoum: Sculpting Horror Across Time

Two artists, one shared fear: the world’s relentless brutality. The Barbican’s encounter between Alberto Giacometti and Mona Hatoum presents two complementary visions

Words by Tova Bach

Above; Alberto Giacometti, Four Figurines on a Pedestal, 1950

The Barbican’s exhibition “Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum” brings together two artists whose visions of violence, fragility and the human condition resonate powerfully across time. Perhaps because it has rarely felt so urgent to confront, almost in real time on our smartphones, the daily horror endured by people living through war.

This collaboration across time breathes new life into the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti (1901-66), one of the leading post-war modern sculptors. He first passed through the Surrealist period before turning to the human figure and questions of scale. His silhouettes are instantly recognisable for their elongated, almost dissolving presence in space.

Left; Alberto Giacometti, Woman with Her Throat Cut, 1932, Bronze, Right; Mona Hatoum, Bourj, 2010, Mild steel tubing

As part of a year-long celebration of Giacometti’s historic works, the Barbican is staging a series of artistic “encounters”, pairing him with contemporary voices. After the more comforting universe shaped with Huma Bhabha, the cultural centre now places the sculptor in dialogue with Mona Hatoum.

Born in Beirut (Lebanon) to a Palestinian family, Hatoum transforms everyday objects into unsettling works, exploring themes of political conflict, displacement and vulnerability while drawing directly on her Palestinian roots and her experiences of exile. She has lived in London since 1975. A short trip was meant to bring her here, but when the Lebanese civil war broke out, she was unable to return. Her heart and her art, however, remain tethered to the violence and trauma endured by those close to her.

Above; Mona Hatoum Interior Landscape

The psychological and emotional aftereffects of violence

Hatoum presents at the Barbican a selection of existing works alongside new pieces, staging hostile environments scarred by violence and tinged with surrealism. There is the stack of welded steel boxes near the entrance, resembling an apartment block that once housed life but now appears perforated by drone or missile strikes and ravaged by war.

It is a stark brutality that mirrors the reality of modern warfare. The display continues with Incommunicado, a steel crib lined with razor-sharp paper that evokes the bars of a prison cell, placed beside Giacometti’s most violent sculpture, Woman with Her Throat Cut. Nearby, Hatoum’s A Bigger Splash responds to that brutality with six giant blood-red splashes cast in glass in a Murano workshop.

Above; Mona Hatoum, Cube, 2006 AND Alberto Giacometti, The Nose, 1947

In this encounter, Hatoum finds parallels between her own vision and that of the Swiss sculptor confronting a terrifying world. Where Giacometti produced this frenetic work within the Surrealist movement, Hatoum seems to take art literally, reproducing reality itself into sculptures. She places viewers before landscapes of oppression and violence, both here and elsewhere. The two artists even meet in a shared piece. Certainly the centrepiece of the exhibition, Giacometti’s The Nose – a kind of bronze Pinocchio – hangs inside a steel cage that evokes Hatoum’s prison-like structures. The Swiss artist’s meditation on the terror of death, inspired by the faces of the dying, becomes imprisoned within Hatoum’s language of oppression. Giacometti’s threadlike figures resonate more than ever as bodies starved by war and as unbearable images of the Palestinian genocide flooding our media.

Above; Mona Hatoum, A Bigger Splash, 2009, Murano Glass

It is striking to witness how artists separated by decades, shaped by radically different histories and influences, can recognise one another and communicate across time through their work. Sculpture has evolved. The media landscape and our ways of consuming images have been upended. Yet their anxiety about the world remains equally palpable. A sombre reminder that history, tragically, repeats itself.