Important Dates

EXHIBITION

Opening for the exhibition  "With these hands" on January 23, 2025 8pm in the Lounge of Iwalewahaus // 

You are invited to (With) These Hands, a photo-essay exhibition curated by Sabelo Mcinziba. The photographed hands tell life stories of everyday practices by people from different walks of life. With history often considered as what happens to a people and often at a national or international scale, the focus at a local scale by everyday people’s hands shifts agency through affirmation of particularities which in turn enrich our sense of true universalism. This exhibition is documented from South Africa and Germany with endless potential across the world focusing on intimate histories of hands in their domestic and professional occupations and often blurring the borders of each.

We are all brought into this world literally by hands and further molded and shaped metaphorically by hands ( grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, neighbours, strangers, enemies, etc.) to become who we become. Focusing on hands can afford us insights into family histories in their cyclical trends and transformative breaks through occupations of different generations within families and in societies at large to mark epochs. (With) These Hands presents hands as a medium of lived experiences and therefore as narrators of embodied consciousness.

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.

(With) These Hands 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.

The 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.

• Exhibition opening: 24 January 2025, 7 pm
• Exhibition: 28.01.2025–20.02.2025
• Venue: Iwalewahaus, Wölfelstraße | Open Tuesday–Thursday: noon–4 pm