Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern

"A comprehensive exploration into 35 years of Hatoum's work in Britain, from her early performance and video works to her sculpture and large-scale installation" is at Tate Modern till 21 August.

"Born in Beirut to a Palestinian family, Mona Hatoum settled in England in 1975. Her work creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities, often making the familiar uncanny. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, she engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination." See a short video at www.tate.org.uk...mona-hatoum

Light Sentence 1992

 "I choose materials in a very intuitive way - if those materials are seductive to me, I want to use them. If they resonate with me, they're gonna have the same effect on people."

Barbed wire - Impenetrable 2009

 When she has a residency somewhere, she often spends her time going around markets and junk shops to find things to use, such as pieces of furniture that she transforms in some way - "assisted readymades, if you like", sometimes united into an environment, perhaps with added electricity.

Cellules 2012/13 - steel bars and red bown glass

 "Sometimes I feel that there's still room for development of each of the works that I somehow worked with and then abandoned to go into something else." She often makes work that responds to a space, and the culture and history of the space and its location. "I go into a totally different direction for that exhibition, and the next exhibition can take me somewhere else."

Undercurrent (Red) 2009

She doesn't used sketchbooks any more - "They're too heavy and too serious". She uses spiral-bound notebooks now, and always carries a small one in her purse. Some of her sketchbooks and notebooks, and smaller objects, are gathered in a vitrine. Beautifully kept.