BOOK:Mona Hatoum, Remains to be Seen (Special Edition), White Cube

Mona Hatoum’s “Remains to be Seen (Special Edition)” is less a conventional exhibition catalogue and more an intimate spatial record. Documenting the artist’s landmark 2019 solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, this limited edition of 200 copies—each signed by Hatoum and housed in a unique cover artwork—chronicles an oeuvre defined by the delicate, dangerous line between structural order and catastrophic collapse.

Rather than presenting a static archive of individual objects, the book takes its structural cue from the lived experience of the gallery visitor. Readers walk through the physical space in print, guided by generous installation shots, tight detail views of complex surfaces, and an incisive essay by Dr. Fiona Bradley. Bradley unpacks how Hatoum channels the poetic and metaphoric charges of raw, industrial materials—steel rebar, concrete, rubble, glass, and even human hair—to reflect on surveillance, confinement, and modern conflict.

The strength of the publication lies in how vividly it captures the formal tensions of the featured works. In the title installation “Remains to be Seen” (2019), heavy industrial building materials are famously transformed into a suspended, floating cube. Made of steel rebar punctuated by jagged chunks of concrete flooring, the hovering grid reduces multi-story architecture to a skeletal outline. The book’s photography meticulously traces how Hatoum subverts Minimalist geometry: the pristine grid of modernism is systematically weaponized, then dismantled.

This thematic interplay between order and ruin recurs throughout the recorded works. “Orbital I “(2018) bends industrial rebar into a global sphere studded with rough aggregate rubble, resembling planets in a chaotic orbit. Meanwhile,” A Pile of Bricks” (2019) places hollow terracotta bricks atop a humble wooden trolley, their window-like perforations caving inward as if crushed by an invisible force.

As a physical object, “Remains to be Seen (Special Edition)” mirrors the materiality of Hatoum’s practice. It serves as a vital, permanent record of an exhibition that laid bare the precarity of our built environment and the global conditions that threaten to tear it down.