Content Inhalt
6–11
Utopian, Imaginary, and Resistant Bodies
Rebekka Seubert
Utopische, imaginäre und widerständige Körper
12–89
Images
Abbildungen
90–103
Would it be okay if we told a story?
Hoda Tawakol and Me
Dr. Omar Kholeif
Wäre es in Ordnung, wenn wir eine Geschichte erzählen?
Hoda Tawakol und ich
104–139
Images Abbildungen
1 Bildunterschrift Pissendi aectem eosandi squiber ferferem. Nobitio moleseque dollaut fuga. Quae parum osandi squiber ferferem. Nobitio moleseque dollaut fuga. Quae parum fugiatem facipsanim id qui
2 comnimust es ellabor eprate consequam, qui qui tem ex et fuga. Feraerovid que conesendus dolenis essitae perior am, sendemos maxim eum re parciis
1 Bildunterschrift Pissendi aectem eosandi squiber ferferem. Nobitio moleseque dollaut fuga. Quae parum osandi squiber ferferem. Nobitio moleseque dollaut fuga. Quae parum fugiatem facipsanim id qui
2 comnimust es ellabor eprate consequam, qui qui tem ex et fuga. Feraerovid que conesendus dolenis essitae perior am, sendemos maxim eum re parciis
Utopian, Imaginary, and Resistant Bodies
Rebekka Seubert
Utopische, imaginäre und widerständige Körper
EN Human existence requires a body—a body that is simultaneously always the origin of a painful and sensuous relationship with one’s inner being and the outer world. A body that accompanies other bodies, that is even able to establish neuronal connections with several other bodies. And also a body that takes a stand against particular circumstances. A body that puts up resistance when it is overwhelmed or appropriated for the wrong thing. This resistant body stands at the center of Hoda Tawakol’s work. The body as the “little fragment of space where I am, literally, embodied [faire corps],” as Michel Foucault stated in his radio lecture “utopian body” (France Culture, 1966).1 It is the outer shell with an interior that cannot be observed, a projection surface; a place of seduction, control, lust, obstruction, and freedom. The body itself is a garment for the soul, everlasting clothing, to which others become accustomed—Oh, that’s you—and which is able to conceal inner impulses: apart from phenomena like blushing, arousal, or goose bumps, in which the interior is displayed involuntarily on the surface of the body. Since this body is generally “also withdrawn, captured by a kind of invisibility from which I can never really detach it. This skull, the back of my skull . . . This back . . . The body is the principal actor in all utopias,”2 for, in the body, everything that exists is implicit, and becomes explicit in the encounter with the other. The body is thus first completed in social exchange and functions as a protagonist in a social game for every person. Connecting, veiling, pupating, emerging, arising anew—such transformations of the self are not promises of salvation but social categories and can, in particular moments, be used, construed, and interpreted anew subversively. Hoda Tawakol produces two- or three-dimensional serial groups of works in which she examines bodies, their skin, and the clothing of it in ever-increasing variations. They always generate a comparison with the scale of the bodies of human beings, animals, and plants—their spectrum ranging from the very small to the oversized. Thus, for instance, the eight-by-eighteen-meter, large-format painting Palm Grove №. 1 (2023): It generates a place whose potential still lies dormant, waiting for an encounter to awaken
it: a palm grove at daybreak, in salt batik and black ink, painted on white fabric with a huge brush made by the artist herself. Though a palm grove is actually a place of fertility, here it represents a place for gathering, protected by tangled undergrowth and the darkness of night; a place of retreat, strategic invisibility, and rebellion. It simultaneously forms an impressive backdrop and spatial context for the textile works of Hoda Tawakol in the exhibition Silent Voices in a Palm Grove (Dortmunder Kunstverein, 2023). Female warriors with an armor of hair (Warrior series, Hair series) are the subversive protagonists of this place, along with enticements in the form of oversized lures inspired by objects from the training of falcons (Lure series). Such actually hand-sized lures are flesh-like imitations of prey made of leather and fabric used to excite and animate falcons to go on hunting flights. The analogies to and associations with human behavior that these works evoke are part of how the artist reflects on historically evolved power relations and erotic tension between the genders. In the work of Hoda Tawakol, the palm grove is correspondingly not only a hiding place—a magical place for regenerating, for gathering, for the furtive coming together of people—but also a symbolic place of fertility and the social dynamics that arise from it: between people, but also among plants. A palm grove offers an unusual bio-social characteristic: If it has too few male or too few female palms, individual trees are able to change gender in order to ensure the survival of the grove, as new plants are created through the fertilizing of male and female palms. This sort of gender fluidity in the plants is an interesting image for the resistant and regenerative potentials that can also be generated by unequal power relations so as to bring them into balance again: a pragmatic social intelligence which has one up over contemporary human society’s exertion of power over female fertility (and the female body as a whole). These moments of tender-cruel dependencies, of ambivalent interpersonal relationships, their power relations, and their pictorial logic are what Hoda Tawakol addresses in her works: for example, when red watercolor paint spreads out over a white sheet
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Dr. Omar Kholeif
Rebekka Seubert
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Sabine Wolf (ENG zu DE)
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