This winter, M.Bassy presents »Falling Tide«, a solo exhibition by Hamburg-based Egyptian-French artist Hoda Tawakol. As the tide falls, the water withdraws, at times with force, pulling and displacing things as it goes. What was hidden beneath the water is exposed. The ground left behind is wet and full of traces: shells, stones, seaweed, holes, broken things. Presence and absence become visible on the same ground.

When Tawakol opened her late grandmother’s apartment in Cairo in 2022, after it had stood uninhabited for five years, it reminded her of the ground left behind by a falling tide: empty of its former life, yet full of traces. Faced with the accumulated belongings of two generations and the impossibility of keeping everything, she and her brother returned to Europe with what they could carry. A century of family history fitted into two suitcases.

The film »Along the Rive«r is like the seabed when the water disappears. Images of the Cairo apartment and the objects that filled it unfold alongside Super 8 footage from a family journey through Egypt in 1974. Two moments, almost fifty years apart, come together in a film about what remains, what disappears and what is carried from one place to another.

“There is something tidal about the experience of diaspora,” Tawakol writes. It is a repeated movement between places, languages and attachments. Something is gained, something is left behind. Memories change, while stories and cultural references travel between generations and places. The rooms of M.Bassy echo something of the Cairo apartment. Their worn walls and visible layers of paint and plaster give the impression that someone has lived there and left. The exhibition inhabits these rooms almost as a second apartment.

But rather than reconstructing the past, memory takes on other forms: a monumental Goddess, a »Womb«, and large textile installations of palms and a sycamore tree transform the apartment into an imagined landscape. The three-channel film »My Mothers« brings together the three women who raised Tawakol, forming a fragmented archive of motherhood and the feminine.

Hoda Tawakol

Hoda Tawakol is a visual artist who lives and works in Hamburg. Her work is rooted in a profound exploration of diasporic identity, gender roles, matriarchy, and the body as a site of memory and transformation. Born in London in 1968 to Egyptian parents, she grew up in both Frankfurt and Paris and earned her MBA in International Management in 1993 from EAP-ESCP with studies in Paris, Oxford, and Berlinin. From 2006 to 2011, Tawakol studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg under Professor Andreas Slominski. In 2010, she received a merit-based scholarship from the German Ministry of Science and Research. In 2022, she was an artist-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut in Marseille. In 2024, she received a publication grant from the Kunstfonds Foundation, which she used to produce her first monograph, »Some Ties Linger On« (Kerber Verlag).

Hoda Tawakol’s works have been exhibited at numerous institutions and galleries in Germany, including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin; the Museum Gunzenhauser in Chemnitz; the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen; the Kunstverein Hamburg; the Kunsthaus Hamburg; the Produzentengalerie in Hamburg and Berlin; and the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Hamburg and Beirut, Lebanon. Internationally, her art has also been on view at SAMOCA in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar; at Gallery Isabelle in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; at Villa Romana in Florence, Italy; and at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, USA. Her works are held in numerous collections, including the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation (SHF), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority Collection, United Arab Emirates; the iSelf Collection, London, UK; the Naila Collection; the Progressive Art Collection, USA; Open Space Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey, and London, UK; the Haus N Collection, Kiel; the Weserburg Museum Collection, Bremen; and in public spaces as part of Chemnitz’s designation as European Capital of Culture 2025.

hodatawakol.com

Opening: 21.11.2026, 7 PM, with an Artist Talk with Hoda Tawakol & Julia Grosse

Please reserve via: reservation@m-bassy.org

M.Bassy e.V., Schlüterstraße 80, 20146 Hamburg
Run time: 22.11. – 20.12.2026, Opening hours: Thu - Sun, 2 - 6 PM

Artist Workshop (date to be announced!)

We would like to thank the Henry Moore Foundation henry-moore.org, the Liebelt Stiftung, Hamburg and the Ministry of Culture and Media, Hamburg for their generous funding and support of the exhibition project.