A revelation of the yr up to now in London has been the brand new house for artwork on the Barbican. A former restaurant there was redesigned and has hosted two of 2025’s finest reveals, through which the up to date artists Huma Bhabha and Mona Hatoum have been proven alongside Alberto Giacometti.
I’ve written earlier than about how inventive languages separated by many years or centuries can have an alienating impact on one another if proven collectively with out subtlety. However these reveals are completely judged and paced. In fact, it’s partly about the proper alternative of artists: Bhabha’s and Hatoum’s work engages with Giacometti’s in kind or topic, and typically 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 wonderful 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 immediately explores figuration, Giacometti’s final obsession. In formal phrases, Giacometti largely constructed his sculptures up from nothing to one thing, whereas Hatoum usually takes the discovered object and manipulates it.
However comparisons usually are not compelled. 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 exhibiting the video.
Carrying emotional power
Most important is that Giacometti’s work just isn’t ossified. He looks like a dwelling 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), shaped from metal bars whose shapes relate to the metallic grids protecting medieval home windows. It solely emphasises the primal and visceral impression of Giacometti’s tortured visage. Elsewhere, his Lady with Her Throat Lower (1932)—certainly one of his early sculptural compositions laden with Surrealist intercourse and violence—is in sight of Incommunicado (1993), Hatoum’s baby’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 filled with aesthetic and lyrical dialog and play, each exhibitions carry an emotional and political power. When he made them, Giacometti’s post-war sculptures appeared aptly to mirror the anxieties and fragility of people in a world reeling from the horrors of the Holocaust. Each Bhabha and Hatoum have created photos that talk to newer world inhumanities. Hatoum has made quite a few works reflecting on her expertise as a girl born in Beirut to Palestinian dad and mom.
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, photos of Gaza as we speak echo Hatoum’s work, from Stays of the Day (2016-18), a home house 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
