As the tide falls, the water recedes, at times with force, carrying away or displacing whatever is not anchored. The ground left behind is wet and full of traces: shells, stones, seaweed, holes and debris. Presence and absence become visible on the same ground.

When the Hamburg-based Egyptian-French artist Hoda Tawakol opened her late grandmother’s apartment in Cairo in 2022, after it had stood uninhabited for five years, it reminded her of the very 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 only with what they could carry. A century of family history fitted into two suitcases. The rooms at 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 again.

In her solo exhibition »Falling Tide«, Tawakol interweaves bodies, objects, landscapes and memories as traces of what has been taken, transformed, or left behind. A 2.5-metre-high »Goddess«, a hybrid figure with a shell-like mask, braided hair, a wing over one shoulder, and adorned with amulets stands enthroned amid a painterly, fabric-based vegetation: The grove of palm trees and the sycamore tree symbolically represent places of nourishment, shelter and life. Flanked by a textile wall sculpture, »Womb«, and shell-shaped ceramic masks, they transform the space at M.Bassy into an imagined landscape, allowing different times and places, the unknown and the familiar, to coexist on the same ground and take on new forms.

The exhibition also features two of the artist's most recent video works: Inspired by memories of her “three mothers”—her mother Honey, her grandmother Toutou, and Hosneia, who cared for her from early childhood—Tawakol navigates the tension between remembering and letting go in her video triptych »My Mothers«, exploring motherhood and the feminine through their overwhelming presence and the absence that lies beneath it. In her latest film »Along the River«, Super 8 footage from a family journey through Egypt in 1974 unfolds alongside images taken while emptying the grandmother's apartment: furniture, letters, old black-and-white photographs and personal objects–some packed and kept, many left behind. The historical film footage ends at the Temple of Isis at Philae—back then still partly submerged and soon to be dismantled and relocated to escape the floodwaters. Almost fifty years apart, the two archives bring together different experiences of distance, belonging and loss.

“There is something tidal about the experience of diaspora,” Tawakol writes–a repeated movement between places, languages and attachments, in which things are gained, left behind and carried elsewhere.

»Falling Tide« weaves together personal fragments of family history and collective cultural myths into a sweeping meditation on what remains when the water recedes—and with regard to the question of home and belonging within the diaspora.

Hoda Tawakol

Hoda Tawakol is a visual artist who lives and works in Hamburg. Her work explores 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 Frankfurt and Paris, France. She earned an MBA in International Management from EAP-ESCP in 1993, studying in Paris, Oxford and Berlin. From 2006 to 2011, Tawakol studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK) under Professor Andreas Slominski. In 2010, she received a merit-based scholarship from the Hamburg 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, supporting the production of 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 Dortmunder Kunstverein, the Kunstverein Hamburg; the Kunsthaus Hamburg; and the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Hamburg and Beirut, Libanon. 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, UAE; 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, UAE; the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority Collection, UAE; the iSelf Collection, London, UK; the Naila Collection, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; 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 (further information and the date will be announced shortly!)

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.