BACK OF MY HAND :: Sara Castelo Branco

With 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 the human body – it’s an archetypal organ to talk about the process of correspondence between theory and practice, thought and materialization. On the other hand, gestures express both ancestral elements, and symptoms or traces of a given time, revealing what we can apprehend from our own contemporary condition. Considering 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. In this sense, 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.

'Back of My Hand' is part of the programming cycle 'For the eyes but not only' by Carpintarias de São Lázaro.

— Side program: lectures, talks and screening.
May 21 : Philippe-Alain Michaud & Sami Khatib, moderated by Jorge Leandro Rosa
June 18 : Stefanie Baumann & Sven Spieker, moderated by / moderated by Teresa Mendes Flores

Support: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes