Is Mona Hatoum a surrealist? Is she the modern-day flagbearer for Arte Povera, the movement that emerged in 1960s Italy and paved the way for conceptual art? Or is she, above all else, a politically motivated artist, working to draw attention to the injustices of our modern world?

Hatoum is Palestinian by parentage. In 1948, her family was forced to flee its home in Haifa because of Israeli intimidation. They moved to Beirut where she was born in 1952. In 1975 she came to London on a visit and found that she could not return because of the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. She decided to enrol at art school (she studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then at the Slade) and eventually became an artist for whom notions of dislocation, restlessness and a conscious lack of rootedness were central to her work.

Her trajectory through life in the Middle East and then in Western Europe, where she now moves between homes in London and Berlin, has undoubtedly been clouded by the dark fist of politics.

But if the politics of global events, issues of displacement, instability and war form the starting point of her work, it is clear that the artist in Hatoum takes over from the activist early on in the creative process. For Hatoum is an artist at heart and a precision craftswoman to her fingertips. She will take an idea and then turn it, with a nimble imagination, economy and wit, into a beautiful minimalist work, often streaked with surrealist mischief.

A show opens at Parasol Unit this week of some 20 works made over the past 12 years. Its title, Present Tense, comes from an installation made in 1996 in Jerusalem. It was Hatoum’s first trip to the city, an emotionally laden journey, and on her first day she came across a map showing little areas circled in red, like islands without connections. The map showed the territorial divisions arrived at under the Oslo Agreement of 1993 and represented the first phase of returning land to the Palestinian authorities. She saw that it was a map concerned with dividing and controlling the area.

Hatoum drew the outlines of the map in tiny red beads painstakingly embedded, one by one, into the surface of blocks of local olive oil soap, laid on the floor in a grid of more than 2,000 blocks. The delicate pattern shows the political map as it was then, although now, with the change in government, some of the areas marked have not been returned to the Arabs.

And there is an additional layer to the work: that of transience. As time passes, Hatoum’s blocks will shrink and the borders will presumably eventually disappear.

Her 2006 installation Mobile Home II is an image of the refugee family seen through their precious belongings. Between two steel road-block barriers she has placed the kind of poor but precious objects that families on the move take with them: a few tea-towels, a stuffed rabbit, a couple of battered suit-cases, a table and stool, a rolled up eider-down. She has arranged them on fine wires and, as you look at this sorry assortment, you are just aware of an almost imperceptible movement as they move slowly from one barrier to the other and back again. The objects have a timelessness and a universality about them. They could have belonged to Hatoum’s family, to refugees from the Blitz, to anyone who has fled with all they could carry.

Not all her works are political. Static, 2006, is a depiction of the simple passage of time. She has decorated a battered metal chair with a large spider’s web made of tiny beads. The chair is the sort on which you might see an old man or woman – in the Middle East, in Africa, in Marseilles or Manchester – sitting and simply watching the passing theatre of life.

No artist works in complete isolation. Hatoum’s work is informed, as is all art, by what has gone before, in her case perhaps by the work of Mario Merz, Duchamp and many others. But she commands her own category: a beautiful, minimalist aesthetic, seemingly effortless in its creation. While political issues may churn and surge in her brain, pure art flows through her veins.

Present Tense: Mona Hatoum is at Parasol Unit (14 Wharf Road, London N1 www.parasol-unit.org, 0207 490 7373) from Friday to August 8 2008

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