Ning-Hui Chung

Mona Hatoum (born 1952, Beirut) is a Lebanese-Palestinian artist whose installations, sculptures, and videos address displacement, conflict, and the politics of the body. Transforming domestic objects into unsettling forms, she exposes the fragility of human existence amid systems of power and control. Her minimalist yet charged works inhabit the threshold between poetry and danger.

Remains of the Day (2016–2018) presents a haunting reconstruction of domestic ruins—burnt furniture and wire mesh forming ghostly traces of a home. Chairs, tables, and objects appear fragile yet tense, suspended between disappearance and persistence. The work evokes the residue of memory after destruction, reflecting the silent aftermath of violence and loss.

In Remains of the Day, Mona Hatoum reconstructs the architecture of disappearance through material tension. Her material framework—charred wood, wire mesh, and ash—embodies both fragility and resistance. Through a methodology of destruction and reconstruction, she transforms remnants into new states of existence, revealing how absence itself can occupy space.

The work bridges psychoanalysis and existential philosophy: the ruins function as extensions of memory, echoing Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, where the home serves as a vessel for memory, now fractured and hollow. Simultaneously, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception is reflected in the viewer’s embodied encounter—feeling instability, silence, and tension as a sensory presence.

In my own sculptural practice, Hatoum inspires me to see fragility as strength. Her transformation of vulnerable materials into emotional architectures encourages me to use absence, gaps, and erosion as expressive strategies. I seek to create miniature spaces where loss and memory coexist—where the unfinished becomes poetic. Hatoum shows that sculpture’s truth lies not in restoration, but in the resonance of what remains.

#Material Fragility #Memory and Ruins #Psychological Space #Poetics of Space #Destruction and Reconstruction

Image credits and website:

Remains of the Day, 2017, courtesy Mona Hatoum Studio https://www.whitecube.com/artworks/remains-of-the-day

Written on: 17 August 2025