Important Dates

EXHIBITION

"With these hands"

curated by artist in residence Sabelo Mcinziba.

Opening 2 October 2024.

Exhibition will run 4 October - 15 November 2024

The photographs of hands are accompanied by abridged essays from in-depth in-person interviews from each participant to answer the posed question: "What have you done with these hands?" The responses are in the physical depictions of the hands which can be engaged imaginatively and creatively without the text. The text can sometimes offer a different reading than the original assumptions and impressions of observers and all of these interpretations are welcome.

This exhibition employs and deploys hands as a leitmotif to summon considerations and conversations on human praxis. Staging hands as a focal point recentres them to tell human stories with hands as sites of intimate intergenerational transfer of knowledge about the self within communities. Hands are also foundational in human(ing) actions which (re)articulate a sense of being in the world through everyday practices and in grand moments. This figuration of histories through hands offer us situated insights into people's navigation of life and its reconfiguration on the questions of race, gender and class in their intersections with intimacy, violence, heritage, aesthetics, memory, etc.

This exhibition portrays the hands of construction workers, musicians, school teachers, gardeners, security guards, cooks, etc. which are also the hands of grandparents, parents, aunties and uncles, siblings, etc. so the dynamism of people is not reducible to a single role by their hands and this makes complex our experiences of life.

The exhibition will be launched on 02 October 2024 at Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, Germany and will be up till 15 November 2024 before it travels to other places.

About Sabelo Mcinziba

Sabelo Mcinziba is a researcher preoccupied with the question of the Human throughout history. His intellectual work is inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary in service of a set of questions that come together when thinking about the human. These include the question of power, violence, trauma, land, death, freedom, aesthetics, space, modernity, identity, heritage, memory, etc. 
He curates audience-participatory and collaborative walking tours in urban and rural settings. The narration method forms intersections between history and the philosophies that shape the past and the present. The tours are an invitation to study how the same patterns are expressed through path dependence and historical recurrence. He is committed to intellectual work that rehumanizes the dehumanized by imagining alternative Afro futures.