Mona Hatoum is an artist living in Britain whose work around issues of fear, fascination, and the body takes the form of performance, video, installation, and photography. Hatoum was born in Lebanon and attended Beirut University College. Her graduate education in London was followed by artist-in-residencies at Western Front in Vancouver and broad international exhibitions, including major solo shows at Centre Pompidou in Paris and Arnolfini in Bristol.

In her 1988, 15 minute biographical video Measures of Distance, she laments the separation from her own family in Palestine, ?I felt as though I had been stripped naked of my soul.? As the video tape progresses the viewer realises that it is a stripping naked of Mona?s soul in the profound sorrow of her separation from her mother. The physical nudity is that of the mother in the videotape, the voluptuous full warm encompassing flesh of a mother?s body, but the emotional nudity is that of the daughter, the filmmaker.

Mona Hatoum?s Measures of Distance has been sited as one of the best personal\political video pieces which began as a performance installation with the artist herself before it was put in a form, a videotape, whereby it could travel without its author and creator, granting Hatoum another distance from her internal landscape of war and loss.