BACK OF MY HAND

Group exhibition

5 May-26 June - Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon

Curated by Sara Castelo Branco

Works by

Basma Al-Sharif, Diogo Evangelista, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Ismaïl Bahri, João Tabarra, Julien Prévieux, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Oscar Santillán, Sanaz Sohrabi, Uriel Orlow.

“The hand was, in more than one aspect, our destiny”, said Elias Canetti. This apparent predisposition is manifested by the fact that the hand is one of the most symbolized parts of human body – an archetypal organ to talk about the process of correspondence between theory and practice, thought and materialization. The representation of hand is also one of the oldest images created by humanity. As a narrative agent of the body – which operates simultaneously through spontaneous gestures or coded and culturally mobilized ones – the hand refers to various iconographic traditions related to the symbolic language of painting, the identity mapping of biometrics, the resistance embodied in political gestures, the palmistry reading of the past and the future, or, the digital media haptic realities – that are expected to permanently alter the hand, and the way we touch, feel and communicate. Given this context, the group exhibition Back of My Hand is based on the way in which different artists work the poetic and political potential of hand, and its relationship with certain dynamics involved in the (in)visibility of images. Therefore, this exhibition presents a series of works in which the hand appears as a mechanism of action, revelation or performativity, aiming to question certain structures of knowledge and historical narrative, and to reflect about a tensioned space between what the image makes visible, and what exists in it in resistance and unintelligibility.

With support by DGARTES

Photo credits: @Photodocumenta