Tamara Al-Mashouk: I don't want to stab the beast I just want to go home

Tamara Al-Mashouk’s new body of work, I Don’t Want to Stab the Beast, I Just Want to Go Home, explores the complexities of belonging and the fragile intimacy of "home." Through photography, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition reflects on memory, displacement, and repair, mapping deeply personal experiences onto broader cultural and political histories.

Spread across two floors at Incubator, the exhibition begins with a series of film photographs of the artist’s childhood compound in Bahrain, captured during her final weeks there. Layered double exposures of fences, trees, and fragments of architecture convey a dreamlike and haunting quality—snapshots of a home that was both sanctuary and site of unease. These images are framed by interventions in the gallery’s architecture, including fabric pinned with gold tacks and layered with imagery, transforming walls into metaphorical windows—thresholds between interior and exterior, self and other.

In the back room, All That Remains presents two modest yet poignant objects: a glass bottle from Beirut, filled with jagua juice—a cleansing and protective substance—and a charred fragment of wood from a sculpture the artist set alight in 2016. These objects are accompanied by a sound piece that fills the space, weaving together recordings from the artist’s childhood home in Bahrain—music, wood pigeons, and ambient noise. Against the backdrop of the conflict in the Middle East, the installation meditates on what remains amid loss, migration, and upheaval.

Downstairs, the atmosphere shifts to one of quiet mourning. The space is darkened, with black curtains covering the windows and a thick black carpet muffling sound. Two spotlights illuminate the room: one falls on a photograph of a burning structure, its edges flickering as though alive, while the other frames the "crying wall," an indigo-painted surface pierced with small openings from which vivid blue "tears" fall. Indigo, a colour often tied to Palestinian ritual and resilience, imbues the space with both solemnity and hope. The installation invites reflection on grief and endurance, transforming the gallery into a space of stillness and contemplation.

Al-Mashouk’s works are at once deeply personal and universal, unearthing the fragile architectures of memory and home. They ask what endures in the face of destruction and displacement and suggest that perhaps it is through repair and ritual that we rebuild not only our spaces but ourselves.

Team:
Kinetic artist: Parkey Heyl
Fabricator: Angus Frost
Performer: ãssia ghendir
Performance Sound Designer: Patricia Doors
Sound Engineer: Jasper Sdougos
Curatorial Advisor: Imani Mason Jordan
Creative Production Advisor: Manon Schwich

Thank you
Evangello and Elias for the ibriq from Beirut
Nick for the very special boombox
Chris for letting us break in & use your tape recorder
Emily for always being there