As part of their daily prayer rituals, while facing toward Mecca, Muslims perform a series of bowings and prostrations that include touching their heads to the ground. Mona Hatoum’s dramatically unsettling Prayer Mat, with its rows of sharply pointed nails and embedded compass, projects a feeling of discomfort by subverting the object’s intended use as a soft, clean surface on which the supplicant can kneel in the direction of the Kaaba, in Mecca, the spiritual home of all Muslims. This complex work, which transforms symbols of comfort and spirituality into something torturous, draws upon the artist’s own experience to suggest the exile’s pain and disorientation in not being able to return home. Hatoum frequently plays with contradictions, such as hard and soft, pain and comfort, to suggest the menacing within the mundane. She often seeks to agitate and challenge viewers with her work. Her imaginative and fearless use of substances such as nails, human hair, and glass marbles has helped to expand the formal and material qualities of artistic expression for a new generation.