‘All exhibited works are very fragile and dangerous’ reads the sign inside Beirut Art Center where ‘Witness’, Mona Hatoum’s exhibition, stands. ‘Fragile art’ I can understand. But ‘dangerous’? Overlooking this warning, I try joining the two glassbottomed swings (‘Balancoires’) to see whether the sandblasted Beirut maps on each seat connect to form the city. I’m loudly reprimanded. It seems the danger of uniting Beirut is greater than I imagined.

During a presentation at the Beirut Art Center last month, the internationally acclaimed Palestinian- born British artist insisted that she doesn’t enjoy the notion of narrowing the meaning of art down to the artist’s origin. ‘I don’t have a specific desire to illustrate my Arabness,’ she said. Yet much of her latest exhibition (presented after a five-week residency in Beirut) seems to stem directly from this region and, where her Middle Eastern heritage is less obvious, her physical origin looms large in the form of her hair.

Hair that’s fallen from her head (the falling strands we usually discard after brushing or washing) was collected in shoeboxes under her bed for six years to be recycled into artworks that are as fascinating as the idea itself. In the same way that Rastafarians and punks use their hair as a sign of their affiliation, these hairy artworks seem linked to an immortal image of the artist. A tiny birdcage houses a mass of hair rolled into a ball, as if shaping Hatoum’s identity and caging it in, while ‘Hair Grids’, a delicate 30x20cm weave of single strands of hair held together with knots and hairspray, hangs like a miniscule tapestry on one of the oversized gallery walls.When Hatoum referred to the notion of ‘being so angry, I could pull my hair out’, I realised that the most fragile-looking piece may actually be the most dangerous of the lot.

‘Witness’ runs until Sept 9