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Hoda Tawakol’s practice is built on the twin pillars of wit and criticality. Her colorful, engaging textile works—collages, sculptures, installations—ripple with vitality, while tackling compelling issues of gender and bodily control. At once captivating and disarming, the works spring from a range of media, yet focus largely on the female body, its distortions and transformations across a woman’s lifecycle.
For her second solo show at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Hoda Tawakol fathoms death less as an end than as a promise of renewal. In works ranging from large-scale textile pieces to more intimate sculptures, Tawakol freeze-frames an instance of transition, a moment teetering between presence and absence, physical and ethereal.
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Here, the body reigns, and the cocoon is the ideal metaphor for this in-between state. The works capture a brief suspension within a transformative cycle, notably the passage beyond death, witnessed by the ancient cocoon-like figures of mummies, sarcophagi, and pyramids.
Tawakol is a sculptor of textile; throughout her practice, fabrics are endowed with a force hoisting them above mere material swathes. They become entities, bristling with breasts or puckered by protuberances. In Tawakol’s hands, fabric is like skin, a sensual membrane between intimacy and exposure.
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I was raised by "three mothers": my mother, my grandmother and my nanny. All three women had voluptuous bodies. The shapes, the abundance and opulence that are connected to their bodies can be found in my work.
Wrapping, moulding, binding, freezing—such are the steps that ‘embalm’ her Mummies (2020), a series of nine plump totems. The artist crams nylons with rice, squeezing, twisting, and sculpting the swelling bulges, before enmeshing them in netting. The fleshy assemblages are then ‘frozen’ in resin, channelling ancient funerary techniques that used the viscous material to mummify for eternity, a gesture that undergirds the entire show’s sense of ‘fixing’ a moment between states.
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A pyramid is like a cocoon: a site of transformation, a site of re-birth. Silk itself is the product of a metamorphosis.
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Immaculate (2018-2020), relishes the unpredictability of dyeing: whether on paper pleated from a central point, or block-folded according to the Japanese shiboiri technique, the ink does what it wants, with the blind determination of a bodily fluid.
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Essay by Fawz Kabra
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Between Bodies | Press Release
