ENCOUNTERS: GIACOMETTI X MONA HATOUM
2025-11-27The Barbican pairs Giacometti and Hatoum to reveal how the human body and the systems around it share the same uneasy terrain.
The Barbican’s new exhibition, Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum, feels like walking into a psychic collision, as it brings together Hatoum’s mix of new and existing works with her own selection of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures, staging an arresting dialogue between two artists separated by nearly a century yet united by a shared impulse to show the human condition stripped raw.
Hatoum, whose practice has long confronted themes of displacement, marginalisation and systems of social and political control, drags Giacometti’s wiry haunted figures straight into her installations, sparking a sometimes jolted conversation across generations.
The metaphorical cage reoccurs like a nightmare, Giacometti’s skeletal frames that look like the bare outline of a trap opposing Hatoum’s deceptive structures that radiate hostility whilst taking the form of the furniture of everyday life. Together their works poke at how architecture and entrapment can shape how the viewer senses frailty.
This is where the pairing holds power, though opposing, both artists meet in the land of vulnerability. Giacometti gives you a single fragile body. Hatoum gives you the systems closing in around it. Together they create this atmospherical uncanny pressure, a contemporary type of dread that brings with it an eerie sense of familiarity.
Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum is on view at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 11th January 2026.
Words – Celeste Aurora Mae
