The Tree Lover by Taqwa Bn Ali
About this activity.
Taqwa Bn Ali, winner of the Royal Award for Free Painting exhibits in SIGN
Award-winning artist Taqwa Bn Ali will exhibit new work in the window of SIGN on the Winschoterkade from 12 July. Her installation عاشق الشجرة | The Tree Lover will be visible from the street day and night during the summer period, or by appointment in SIGN.
The Tree Lover (tree lover) by Taqwa Bn Ali is an installation consisting of five paintings on wooden panels, combined into a three-dimensional painting in the form of a large open box. The viewer can literally step into the painting. Within the red installation we see an isolated void, a dollhouse-like room, covered with hibiscus tint and textured with tree bark and hibiscus pulp. There are traces of an Arabic text engraved in the back wall with charcoal, which leaves a residue on the floor. The text reads like a personal note or a revelation in the form of a poem:
You, who loved the tree,
Climb
Fear not
The Height
The fall
The wound
The tears
The blood
يا من عشقت الشجرة،
تسلق
لا بأس خوف المرتفعات
و الوقوع
و الجروح
و الـدموع
و الدم
In Ali’s work, her relationship with leaving home becomes a central theme through which she explores the diaspora. In this installation, she depicts a poetic relationship between a tree and its lover as a metaphor, where loving the tree is equal to loving to climb, fall and bleed. The work invites the viewer to climb the constructed foundation and enter the interior of the painting. To touch, smell and live in a space of total isolation. The box becomes a space for personal reflection or a torture chamber.
About the artist
Taqwa Bn Ali (1997, Sudan) is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Netherlands. Her work, spanning painting, sculpture and performative interventions, explores themes of translocation, integration and identity through a deep engagement with materiality. Rooted in research, Ali’s work examines the symbolic and emotional power of natural materials – their ability to bridge gaps created by displacement, particularly within diaspora experiences. Her approach begins with the material itself: clay, earth, hibiscus, gum arabic – each a vehicle of memory, heritage and transformation. As she explains: “The material always comes before the idea. It determines my movements; I work with it”.
Ali received the Royal Award for Painting in 2025 for her Hibiscus Paintings, a series that recalls the hibiscus flower – a central motif in Sudanese culture – as a symbol of resilience and autonomy. The pigment, extracted from flowers sent by her mother in Sudan, becomes both medium and message. Hibiscus, once a commodity under colonial trade, is recontextualized in Ali’s work as a living thread between past and present, homeland and exile. Its unstable nature (its color changes with light, temperature, and time) reflects her broader concerns with transience, memory, and migration.
Her practice is not only a return to origins, but also an act of reinterpretation. Through experimental processes and ritual gestures, Ali transforms the physical properties of materials into layered landscapes of personal and political meaning. In this way, she invites the viewer into a space where connectedness is tangible, vulnerable and always in motion.
Taqwa Bn Ali graduated from the Maastricht Zuyd Art Academy in 2023, in the direction of Interdisciplinary Arts, and won the Henriette Hustinx Prize that same year. In 2025, she received the Royal Award for Free Painting. She is currently studying for the master’s degree in Arts, Cognition and Criticism at the University of Groningen.
عاشق الشجرة | The Tree Lover can be seen from 12 July to 30 August in the window of SIGN at Winschoterkade 10, Groningen. The installation can be viewed from the inside by appointment, call 0623631796. The exhibition will be festively opened on July 12 at 5:00 PM, be welcome!
Images: Danique Jaspers, @qiqi_visuals
SIGN.
SIGN is een levendige en experimentele projectruimte voor actuele interdisciplinaire kunst op nationaal niveau. Zij biedt jonge kunstenaars een podium voor verdere profilering, ontwikkeling en intensivering van hun kunstenaarschap. Daarbij wordt nieuw werk geïnitieerd in bijzondere contexten en wordt de nodige reflectie gegeven. Presentaties zijn er in SIGN, op allerlei locaties, en in openbare ruimte met een variatie aan omstandigheden, invalshoeken, disciplines.
SIGN wordt ondersteund door Mondriaan Fonds Kunstpodium Basis 2025-2028 en door de Gemeente Groningen voor dezelfde periode.
Location.
SIGN
Winschoterkade 10
9711 EA Groningen
tel 050-3132651 of 0623631796
www.sign2.nl