The Nivola Foundation and Museum is pleased to present Behind the Seen, a solo exhibition by the artist Mona Hatoum, the result of a residency carried out in Orani during which Hatoum explored the territory of Sardinia, deepening her contact with the local cultures and artisanal practices of the island.

Curated by Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, and Luca Cheri, the exhibition offers an itinerary through historical works and many new productions, some of which were created in collaboration with local artisans. Behind the Seen reflects on the relationship between body, material, and territory, between what is visible and what remains hidden.

Through a language that combines formal minimalism and political tension, Hatoum questions the ways in which space is regulated, surveilled, colonized. Her work does not offer solutions, but constructs environments of experience and suspension, in which the viewer is constantly called to reposition themselves, to negotiate their own point of view, to "see" what remains behind the scene.

In this sense, her works act as critical zones of perception, where the artistic gesture becomes a tool for excavation, deconstruction, and unveiling.

The title of the exhibition plays indeed on the double meaning between seen and scene, suggesting a look behind the appearances, towards the hidden spaces of human experience: memory, trauma, identity, and the desire for resistance.

Through works that combine formal research with a profound political reflection, Behind the Seen challenges the power structures that regulate our way of seeing and inhabiting the world, revealing what is often hidden behind the surface.

Mona Hatoum's work revolves around a series of fundamental tensions: interior and exterior, visible and invisible, attraction and repulsion, control and vulnerability. From the beginning, her practice has been configured as a critical device capable of destabilizing the neutrality of spaces, objects, and forms, showing how every surface can conceal a threshold of ambiguity or a zone of conflict.

The dimension of the body - not only as a physical organism but as a political and affective entity - is central to her work. Her early performative interventions in the 1980s directly explore the relationship between the female body, urban space, and surveillance devices. Later on, the body disappears from the scene, making way for traces, imprints, or symbolic objects of confinement: cages, beds, nets, and hospital screens become spatial metaphors of her absence-presence, evoking a vulnerable subjectivity exposed to control.

The theme of control runs through Hatoum's research through minimal structures that incorporate allusive and threatening materials: barbed wire, iron, glass, steel. Domestic objects - beds, chairs, utensils - are destabilized, transformed into instruments of containment or aggression. This disturbed domesticity suggests that even the spaces of intimacy can be crossed by dynamics of power, coercion, and discipline.