Biography

Hala Tawil is a Lebanese visual artist based in the Netherlands. She holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Beirut, Lebanon and a Master in Fine Arts & Design from Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She has worked closely alongside different established artists, designers, and architects, in both Lebanon and in the Netherlands. She draws from her professional experiences in different artistic & design disciplines to explore the relationship between the emotional body and physical spaces in her own artistic practice. Tawil focuses on digital tools in her work, as she believes there lies a freedom in the immateriality of the medium to explore the abstractions that exist between the physical body and its material surroundings.

Alongside her artistic practice, Tawil is also freelance visual designer.  

Artist Statement

Using combined digital techniques of illustration, collage, and modelling, I construct images of interior spaces and framed views that center on the female form. Influenced by my studies in architecture and object design, I aim to reflect on the relationship of the body with its material surroundings.

Although the female figures in my work are often slender, white, and unintimidating, they are rendered incomplete, partially concealed or fragmented; passive objects to their circumstance, merely lingering in the room. My images aims to create uneasy and mysterious narratives of desire, freedom and loneliness, set in sparse yet odd spaces.  

https://halatawil.com/

https://www.instagram.com/_halatawil/

‍What is one thing you’d like our readers to know about you?

I have been told that I come across as "calm, cool, and collected," but truthfully, I cannot fall asleep without headphones on because my thoughts are too intrusive for a good night's sleep. As a side-sleeper, this has given me chronic neck pain.

What is your biggest source of inspiration?

"Buildup of tension." I love moments--let's say, a prolonged pause in a film or a lingering passage in a book, before a kiss or a scream--where you literally hold your breath in anticipation of a release. I look for this in my own work: visualizing a moment right before something huge happens. 

Otherwise, I am also very inspired by different ideas of longing, loneliness, and romance...and I pick that up from everywhere, really: novels, paintings, TV, tiktok, people-watching...

Why do you create and how has your art practice affected your life?

I create work because it provides me with both a sense of purpose and a form of escapism. After years of schooling and professional work, I honestly am not trying to prove anything to anyone. I don't consider my work as an intellectual exercise, at least not in a deliberate sense. I allow it to be some strange form of regurgitation of absorbed imagery from an overstimulated mind, but I also no longer attach my identity to what I produce. This had made me feel much more free with my own work, truly believing that first and foremost, I make art for myself and my own well-being.

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