Mahmoud Tarek

THE HISS, 2024 🔥 Musical Instrument carved out of hollowed Timber, Phosphorus Bronze Strings, Lyre Harp Tuning Pegs, Truss Collar screws, Lacquer, Welded Steel. Installation shots from Städelschule Rundgang ‘24 accompanied by sound recorded from the instrument.

Witness, 2023 Mixed-media installation Viewing device, Video, Sound, Metal Sound in collaboration with @zadithjunior Documentation from Städelschule Rundgang 2023

New song available now on youtube and Soundcloud. Link in Story and Bio for full Music Video.

🔊 Visualizer for my new single "Themisto" out on soundcloud for now and later on other platforms when I rob a bank. Check it out, link in story/description.

Universal Baby Rattle, 2024 Iron, Steel, Anodized Copper Cymbals, Ash 13x9x6 cm From the sculpture series "Metamorphoses", wherein certain animals are trapped in a fiction where they morph into musical instruments. "A cast iron Tarantula is forced into its own immediate instrumentalization with burnt cymbals carved into its hard shell, and in turn displays its radiant colours and covers itself in industrial ash." The series Metamorphoses included an Ouroboros and a swan, symbols extracted from mythology, common anthropological interest be it romantic or war-ridden, as well as gothic cultural byproducts. Last picture as shown in Neue Alte Brücke "Against Nature" in 2024 curated by Alex Thake. Last photo credit goes to Paul Levack.

A portrait of Goethe with everything, 2025 Paint on Wood, Inkjet Print 185x145cm The painting directly references a photograph that was taken of me as a child, which neither of my parents remember taking, and so I brought back that monster, fed him Goethe, and left the picture as a silhouette. Exhibition pictures from "Overture", as shown in summer of 2025 at the Städelmuseum in Frankfurt am Main.

✹ 𝐌𝐀𝐇𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐃 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐊 showing at quovadis: 𝐋𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫, Sound Performance 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐭: October 10, 20.25 - 20.50 PM  Mahmoud Tarek (@threqts ) is an artist born in 1998, in Alexandria, Egypt and currently based in Frankfurt am Main. He studied at Städelschule – Hochschule für Bildende Kunst from 2021 – 2025. Tarek works with sound, film, photography, printing and performance. With an emphasis on urban settings, domestication and animals in history and landscapes, his multidisciplinary works use distortion to antagonize an anthropocentric gaze with which the contemporary world is perceived, deploying images to devices or hiding them in domestic symbols. By dislocating narratives from meaning to sensation, Tarek’s work displays unreliability in the instruments of perception and the meaning produced at its site, establishing sensation as a unit of experience, and the image as material.    Recent Shows include: “Against Nature” (Neue Alte Brücke), “Perhaps Here” (Perform Sharjah’24), “The Educational Web” (KVH), and “Rocking Meadows” (Kunstverein Wiesen).

Our Cloud, 2025 2,80 x 1,40m Installation View from "Overture" at @staedelmuseum this July 2025. Excerpt from the artist statement: "The work begins with symbolic forms—landscapes, domestic materials, animals—familiar structures that carry inherited meaning. Through perceptual distortions, I treat these symbols not as fixed units but as placeholders within shifting systems. Their function is not to communicate directly, but to register the instability of their own status. I’m interested in what happens when “universal” symbols—like clouds, or Goethe—lose their god-like status. Once relocated into museum space, they don’t just gain visibility—they start to rot. The Cloud stretches a rope reaching down from its insides without intent, and Goethe isn’t the Enlightenment; he’s trapped in the throat of a suburban monster. These aren’t only metaphors in the literary sense, but arrangements that complicate visibility. One central image derives from a family photograph painted onto wood where the subject’s head—my own—was carved out. What remains is negative space, filled by a cartoonish monster in the background. That figure reappears not as a symbol of trauma, but as a structural solution: a way to account for absence without resolving it. The work doesn’t seek coherence. It uses familiar codes to expose the point at which they break down, or worse, begin to function too smoothly."

Graduated fr

a warm invitation to a nite& morning of music& ambience in a warehouse setting. subtle sounds& steady rhythms to pleasant turns for curious ears& sensitive hearts. monochrome& natural light to ease you in immersion and let you drift. room tuned sound system smart bar 0 tolerance for disrespectful behaviour of any kind 6.6.25 23:59h - daimlerstr 32 60314 - 10€