It feels particularly poignant to be installing Mona Hatoum’s ‘Electrified (Variable) III’, (2020) in our new collection displays @hepworthwakefield opening today. Commissioned and acquired in 2020 through the @contemporaryartsociety Great Works award, ‘Electrified (Variable) III’ is a precarious column of domestic objects charged with an electric current. In 1975 Hatoum was forced into exile in London when the Lebanese Civil War broke out. Marked by this forced uprooting, much of Hatoum’s work centers on ideas of home and displacement through a language of sculpture built on the form and symbolism of everyday objects, objects that act as portals to a happier place or time. The electrical charge that runs through them renders them hazardous and threatening, but also full of life.