Closing: هناكل في البيت Where the Passionate Few Gather Under the Rubble

Championship Tournament and Egyptian Dinner

For the show’s closing, the artist will host a championship tournament for the art work central to this exhibition. The game is a textile sculpture, overlaid on a table and plays similarly to a matching game. Sign up for the tournament on instagram @emmachammah or email info@emma-emma.com. The tournament will be followed by a seated dinner serving a traditional Egyptian meal, Molokheyya. Dinner spots are limited. RSVP required only for the dinner.

More about the exhibition:

— Exhibition Statement
Tennessee Gallery · September 18, 2026 – September 25th, 2026
هناكل في البيت
Hanakul fil Beit
“We’re eating at home” was a phrase on repeat growing up. When we begging for fast food or candy or something tasty from a vendor, we were not thinking about what we would be missing eating at home. Eating at home also meant something was certain, that there was room for invitation: a neighbor would turn up, or an auntie, or maybe its the handy man. The food and the table were never really the point. They were the vehicle for connection and conversation, and somewhere in that, without anyone naming it, you felt cared for. Emmanuelle Chammah’s work borrows that logic on purpose: Middle Eastern hospitality less as a memory than as a structure, a framework she keeps building from.

Ahlan wa Sahlan. Hello and welcome. Consider yourself hosted here for a few minutes, or a few hours. Chammah is an interdisciplinary artist working with sensation and the human body through textiles and digital media. She hand makes wearable sculptures and immersive installations that serve as hosts for exploring cognition, connection, and mental health. Hosting people, and building the spaces and objects that hold room for conversation, sits at the center of that practice, along with a long-running interest in the craft of nomadism: what it means to build things that are compact, deployable, and able to serve more than one purpose at once. Here, a house without walls: an overhanging canopy, displaying hand-wrapped vinyl tubing filled with Egyptian food items, doing double duty as both structure and pantry. Turmeric hand-dyed bed sheet remnants fill some of the the squares. Below it, a dining table set with mismatched chairs holds 88 small stitched pods and weighted lattice, an interactive and sensory matching game that plays easily and doubles as a shared, weighted blanket. Larger pods, like place settings that wandered off, are scattered across the surrounding walls.

Chammah has a deep belief in care, and in craft as a way of bringing that care back into daily life, by finding another way to move through it: slower, softer, alongside rather than opposed. This room is an invitation to do that for a while. To notice the making again, how something is built and who built it, and what it means to be looked after, even briefly, by a someone else’s hands.