HODA TAWAKOL

Tawakol’s broad practice encompasses hand-dyed and sewn textile pieces, mixed media sculptures, fabric collages, and installations interweaving textures, grids and lattices in addition to works on paper. Her approach to contemporary textile art is deeply rooted in the feminist movement of the 1970s that revived the medium as a critical and discursive practice embedded in the history of women’s knowledge and labour. The artist’s research focuses on traditional ritual practices and imagery associated with those pivotal transitional and transformative moments in a woman’s life. Her work attempts to deconstruct symbols and archetypes that beset female agency.

Through the variety and compositional complexity of her aesthetic interventions such as in her large-scale textile collages, Tawakol in her work, touches on the boundary between the extreme figuration of personal identities and their dissolution, even to the point of disintegration. In taking up such forms in her series of aquarelles, Tawakol is interested in relating formal aesthetic concerns to societal issues, especially to those of a gender-specific nature.

Hoda Tawakol’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions and galleries in Germany, including Lothringer 13 in Munich, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, RElíGIO Westfälisches Museum für religiöse Kultur in Telgte, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus in Hamburg, Wiensowski & Harbord and Ph-Projects gallery in Berlin; and internationally at Sfeir-Semler gallery in Lebanon, Beton Art Space in Denmark and at 10th Velada Santa Lucía in Venezuela. Her work appears in the following collections: The Progressive Art Collection (USA), Sammlung Haus N of Gunda & Peter Niemann (Germany), SØR Rusche (Germany), and Sohst-Brennenstuhl (Germany).