Hoda Tawakol: Delicious Monster

For the series Delicious Monsters, Franco-Egyptian artist Hoda Tawakol, who was born in London, Great Britain, in 1968, grew up in Paris, France, and now lives in Hamburg, combines her fabric sculptures reminiscent of dolls, wigs and masks with tree and leaf shapes made of fibreglass-reinforced plastic. With the shape of the window leaf (Monstera deliciosa), the artist references a botanical plant genus that seems to be at home in the living and working spaces of Central Europeans. However, its ancestors were once taken from their tropical home in Central America to Europe by colonial plant hunters and cultivated in botanical collections as easy-care houseplants.

However, Tawakol's ‘delicious monster’ does not torment itself in a narrow flowerpot. Starting from a thick trunk, branches bound as if from textiles stretch far into  their surroundings. Black-coloured foliage appears grafted on, red and purple roots spread across the floor like blood vessels or fragments of bodies.  Through its form and colour, the work develops a high symbolic power in the mental space it initiates. It plays with the viewer's associations, evoking longing and effort, power structures and their options, as well as growth and decay, giving and taking.

Tawakol's Delicious Monster links the eventful history and identity of its location in Limbach-Oberfrohna, where historical, physical and mental situations converge. In one of Saxony's oldest mining areas, the remains of pits and spoil heaps can still be seen today, tracing an inverted network of roots on the Ulrichsberg and bearing witness to the mining history of the Wolkenburg district since the 13th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Detlef Carl Graf von Einsiedel furnished the garden of Wolkenburg Castle with a sculpture ensemble cast from Lauchhammer black iron based on ancient models. Although constructed from ‘light’ material, Tawakol's work seems to absorb the heaviness of iron as well as its colour. In the early 18th century, the Limbach entrepreneur, black printer and inventor Johann Georg Esche found a stocking knitting machine at the home of a Huguenot living in Dresden, which he further developed based on a French model. Supported by his sovereigns of Schönberg, Esche laid the foundation for the region's successful textile industry. In 1870, his descendants moved the Limbach hosiery factory to Chemnitz, turning not only their company but also the city into an international industrial and cultural centre of Europe.  

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)