The appliance of science

She experiments with magnets, iron filings and vegetable-slicers. But is Mona Hatoum's work political? She talks to Rachel Halliburton

It could be a mad scientist's laboratory, a Kafkaesque torture chamber or an anarchist's playground. Wires trail picturesquely but lethally through a range of metallic Fifties household objects; naked light-bulbs nestle incongruously below upturned colanders, in food containers and under a table; while to one side an old metal cot prepares to be transformed from symbol of nursery-time innocence to electrified cage.

The artist responsible for this scene of domestic subversion is rushing around, sorting out the exact positioning of objects and finalising technical details. Then she switches the exhibit Homebound on, and as the light-bulbs glow on and off, your ears are assaulted by the kind of electronic buzz that might herald the awakening of Frankenstein's monster.

The setting is the Tate Gallery, one week before the opening of Mona Hatoum's first major one-person exhibition in a high-profile London gallery. It is a welcome act of recognition for an artist who for more than 20 years has confronted onlookers with works both political and playful, revelling in ambiguities, illusions and the sense of a world constantly oppressing you with false boundaries.

Like one of her first influences, Magritte, who wrote of his "determination to make the most familiar objects scream aloud", Homebound reflects her fascination with making the cosy lethal: in earlier works such as Doormat a "Welcome" mat bristles aggressively with foot-piercing pins, in Light at the End strips of light at the end of a dark room reveal themselves to be capable of burning flesh, while in Entrails Carpet, an expanse of false human entrails invites you to a squelchy crossing.

Some works are throwaway jokes, others resonate at several levels, but all the time she is asking questions about power and identity in relation to the body. Are you in control or not? Are you the tortured or the torturer? Do you belong or are you an exile? Are you the saved or the damned?

Hatoum's own sense of exile from her Middle Eastern background obviously makes her an interesting choice for staging one of the exhibitions relaunching the original Millbank-based Tate as Tate Britain. As her work constantly reminds us, the notion that she has roots at all is an anomaly, since she was born in the Lebanon to exiled Palestinian parents (who were also Greek Orthodox Christians), spoke Arabic at home and French at school, and was exiled herself to Britain because she was on holiday here in 1975 when the Lebanese civil war broke out.

In contrast to (or perhaps because of) her elusive national identity, as an individual she projects a striking, well-defined image, with dark curls framing her face and running down to her shoulders, and a strong mouth emphasised by bright lipstick - which she is anxious to renew before the photographs are taken.

Solemnity frequently gives way to open child-like amusement during the interview, though both are clearly underlined by a passionate bloody-mindedness which makes it clear that no matter what the public perception, she is defiant that her ideas will be realised.

"I grew up with a constant sense of insecurity, of not being able to identify completely or feel part of the environment I grew up in," she tells me. "Like all the Palestinians who ended up in Lebanon, my family were never encouraged to integrate, and although I spent 23 years in the Lebanon, I never got my Lebanese identity card. Because of this, I was always reassessing every aspect of my surroundings. Often my art transforms things to make you question the objects around you."

In her earlier career, Hatoum experienced problems when the link between the art and the concept inspiring it was unclear, making people ask entirely the wrong questions. The public respect accorded her in the wake of her 1995 nomination for the Turner Prize is a far cry from the initial sneering reactions of the press when she presented a performance piece called Under Siege in 1982 - spending seven hours naked in a transparent container of clay, struggling and slithering to stand up.

Her preoccupation with the body's capacity both to shock and to express vulnerability and humiliation found fame in the wrong way. Several people saw the piece as no more than a piece of artistic angst, and tabloid headlines leered "Nude has ticket to writhe". It was only when Israel invaded her home city, Beirut, a few days later that her audience woke up to her deeper political intentions "to remind people at a time when everyone was saying there had been no war for 40 years, that war was happening all around them".

Reminding the West about its complacency is a strong motivation behind Hatoum's art, but there is also a positive emphasis on the exile's ability to distance themselves, and be more questioning and critical of their surroundings. In Hatoum's world, the exile views objects in a detached way, as if in a laboratory, discovering qualities that lie hidden from eyes blinded by habit and convention.

After transcribing our conversation, I notice that the notion of being like a scientist permeates her language: "I was experimenting with electricity going through household objects at the Slade. I was also experimenting with electricity going through water - it was beautiful. But also deadly."

As a child her favourite toy was a microscope - "I liked looking at enlarged skin surfaces and hair." No surprise then, when she combined her passion for experimentation and the expressiveness of the body by filming inside herself with an endoscope, famously winning her nomination for the Turner Prize with the result, Corps Etranger.

Sheena Wagstaff, the curator of exhibitions at Tate Britain, was living in the US when she saw Hatoum's Corps Etranger on a visit. She was excited by how it made the experience of the exile positive by highlighting disorientation as an opportunity for re-examination of the environment. "What Tate Britain stands for is NOT questioning national identity, but for questioning the sorts of conditions in which we exist today," she explains. "Mona's work emphasises displacement and replacement, and combines science and art to create a dynamic interrogative tool."

There are two other pieces in the exhibition: Mouli-Julienne - an old-fashioned device for slicing vegetables, enlarged 21 times, and Continental Drift - a round horizontal glass sheet carrying raised shapes of every country in the world, while a magnetised electronic arm shifts iron filings constantly backwards and forwards in the sea areas, creating a continual sense of disturbance.

The onlooker is treated to an Alice-in-Wonderland style of dislocation, which taps into another aspect of Hatoum's creativity - her strong streak of child-like imagination and humour. "I chose the Mouli-Julienne because it had the feeling of being like an extinct animal, a dinosaur," she smiles. At a later point she reveals that she likes electricity and magnetism because they are "invisible forces".

This exhibition opens at an interesting time for Hatoum. At the age of 48 she has lived longer in Britain than she did in Beirut, which raises further questions about the notion of being an exile. Tellingly she relates how, "Somebody phoned me from an Arabic radio station and asked if they could interview me. I said 'No way' because I have no technical words in Arabic to describe what I do - I've learnt them all in English."

Tate Britain, London SW1, 020-7887 8000 from Friday