Hands. An Art Campaign

In 2021, the HANDS exhibition ventured into bringing tactile sensations, playfulness, and interaction back into public life – in the midst of a pandemic in which touch and hands are in and of themselves stigmatized as sources of contamination. The short film HANDS. An Art Campaign presents the project and the participating artists.

The challenge for artists in this moment was to create sustainably accessible artistic practices, to anchor artworks in everyday realities and to fully utilize their playful and therapeutic potential. Touch Again! Live with Art! Let’s Play! represented the parameters that defined the rules of play for these artworks. The artists in the exhibition created objects that are tactile (Touch Again!), reproducible and thus more accessible (Live with Art!), and that inspire playfulness (Let’s Play!).

Nine artists – Cevdet Erek, Ali Eyal, Shilpa Gupta, Taus Makhacheva, Dhali Al Mamoon,••PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT, Evariste Richer, Yazan Rousan and Antje Van Wichelen with Maxime Gids – were invited to each create an artwork according to these specifications. As part of the art campaign the artists also made multiples of each object – sometimes identical to the exhibits or in sizes smaller than the mother objects, sometimes as fractions or as an essence of the exhibit. They were available for a standard affordable price, independent of production costs and name recognition of the artist. The goal was to demystify art, to detach it from gallery and marketing strategies and to transfer it from institutional spaces to private and public ones.