A revelation of the yr thus far in London has been the brand new area for artwork on the Barbican. A former restaurant there was redesigned and has hosted two of 2025’s finest reveals, through which the modern artists Huma Bhabha and Mona Hatoum have been proven alongside Alberto Giacometti.
I’ve written earlier than about how creative languages separated by a long time or centuries can have an alienating impact on one another if proven collectively with out subtlety. However these reveals are completely judged and paced. After all, it’s partly about the correct alternative of artists: Bhabha’s and Hatoum’s work engages with Giacometti’s in type or topic, and generally each. However a part of the enjoyment of those reveals—curated by the Barbican’s Shanay Jhaveri alongside Émilie Bouvard, the director of collections and scientific programme on the Fondation Giacometti—is in the best way that affinities and distinctions are equally welcome.
The superb exhibition information for the Giacometti-Hatoum present notes that each artists are “preoccupied with the human physique in its vulnerability and resilience” however factors out that Hatoum by no means straight explores figuration, Giacometti’s final obsession. In formal phrases, Giacometti largely constructed his sculptures up from nothing to one thing, whereas Hatoum typically takes the discovered object and manipulates it.
However comparisons aren’t pressured. The lightness of the associations is exemplified in the best way that the type of Giacometti’s Figurine Between Two Homes (1950), a strolling determine in a vitrine between two containers, is gently echoed within the movie of Hatoum’s efficiency Roadworks (1985), through which she walked barefoot, dragging her Dr Martens boots behind her by their laces: she is “contained” like Giacometti’s determine, however in a monitor displaying the video.
Carrying emotional drive
Most vital is that Giacometti’s work is just not ossified. He seems like a residing artist. Bhabha and Hatoum have been offered nearly as collaborators. Within the Hatoum present, Giacometti’s sinister head with a vastly prolonged nostril, Le Nez (1947), is contained inside Hatoum’s cage, Dice (2006), fashioned from metal bars whose shapes relate to the metallic grids masking medieval home windows. It solely emphasises the primal and visceral affect of Giacometti’s tortured visage. Elsewhere, his Lady with Her Throat Minimize (1932)—one among his early sculptural compositions laden with Surrealist intercourse and violence—is in sight of Incommunicado (1993), Hatoum’s little one’s cot whose springs have been changed with cheese wire, turning it right into a home killing machine.
Bhabha and Hatoum have been offered nearly as Giacometti’s collaborators
However whereas stuffed with aesthetic and lyrical dialog and play, each exhibitions carry an emotional and political drive. When he made them, Giacometti’s post-war sculptures appeared aptly to replicate the anxieties and fragility of people in a world reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust. Each Bhabha and Hatoum have created pictures that talk to newer world inhumanities. Hatoum has made quite a few works reflecting on her expertise as a lady born in Beirut to Palestinian mother and father.
I noticed the Giacometti-Hatoum present the day after the Worldwide Affiliation of Genocide Students handed a decision stating that Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the authorized definition of genocide, as specified by the UN conference. Again and again, pictures of Gaza at the moment echo Hatoum’s work, from Stays of the Day (2016-18), a home area apparently decimated after a cataclysmic occasion, to Inside Panorama (2008), a naked mattress with barbed wire springs and a pillow into which the historic map of Palestine has been embroidered in human hair.
Subsequent to those works, Giacometti’s figures, with their “extraordinary however apparently perishable grace”, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, appear as if made yesterday; everlasting emblems for humanity amid a brutal world.
• Mona Hatoum, Encounters: Giacometti, the Barbican, London, till 11 January 2026
