In his 2009 guide The Pondering Hand: Existential and Embodied Knowledge in Structure, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa considers the disconnect between the thoughts and physique because of the prioritising of the digital and the visible, re-examining, over a number of chapters, the importance of the knowledge a physique inherently is aware of. That is the cornerstone of the primary present to be staged at Thea, a brand new exhibition house specializing in artwork and know-how from images platform Noorderlicht in Groningen. Adopting the moniker from Pallasmaa’s textual content, ‘Pondering Arms’ (till 1 November 2026) brings collectively 23 photographers and lens-based artists and artist duos, working each with conventional strategies and digital programmes, to additional interrogate these concepts.
Within the days instantly previous to opening, neighbours have been invited in for a preview. One in all these early guests, recollects normal and creative director Roosje Klap, was fast to share their shock to find the house not crammed solely with pictures of fingers. ‘That may be actually boring, wouldn’t it?’ asserts Klap. ‘It’s humorous what individuals anticipate.’ There are, nevertheless, loads of fingers, fingers and forearms captured in close-up all through Thea, which occupies some 8,000 sq m of Niemeyer, a former tobacco manufacturing facility presently in growth as a serious new tradition and tech centre (of which Klap is cultural growth lead).
Within the 1934 brief movie, Arms, for instance, authored by filmmakers Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke for the Works Progress Administration – a part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, it employed hundreds of thousands of jobseekers in public works initiatives – the digital camera carefully observes as individuals write cheques, tie bandages and hammer nails, with out revealing anybody’s identification. Paul Kooiker’s 2023 music video for ‘Ze is pas web begonnen’, by the Dutch band De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, equally zooms in: in Kooiker’s trademark gray palette, over 4 minutes and eight seconds, a pottery wheel spins as a sequence of fingers knead, form, and open the clay, to various ranges of eroticism.
Close by, below the banner ‘The Unseen Hand’ (the present is split into 5 sections, every targeted on a means the physique exhibits what it is aware of), Kiki Mager’s 5000times (2016) recreates footage from a producing facility in Shenzhen, utilizing animation to focus on the invisible labour of a single pair of fingers over in the future, in the course of the manufacturing of smartphones, tablets and laptops. In ‘The Language of Contact’, Koos Breukel’s The Arms of Sally Mann (2008) centres the American photographer’s fingers, her nails stained and soiled from darkroom chemical compounds, instead of a standard front-facing portrait, whereas Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s Sorry I Gave Delivery I Disappeared However Now I’m Again (2016-2022), that includes a mixture of giant framed pictures and 6×4-inch footage hooked up to the wall with delicate pink tape, examines the early levels of motherhood, highlighting the physique’s intrinsic understanding of (and coping with) care and luxury.
‘Mental information all the time has been higher information, proper? It is a larger information. However I am beginning to assume that possibly bodily information is definitely higher,’ displays Klap, who curated the present with Musoke Nalwoga. ‘The cognitive information may be mimicked, however one thing that we all know in our physique, to essentially have that nice instinct, it is probably not a cognitive factor. Pallasmaa gave examples like how one can sit in a chair, how one can stroll, and I additionally thought of as an illustration, ceramics. In case you’ve ever accomplished a pottery course, it is actually tough. This factor is rotating, your clay goes in every single place. However rapidly, you are able to do it, your physique has realized.
‘The artists,’ she continues, ‘actually perceive the urgency of what is at stake proper now and I really feel, as a occupation, they see we’re shedding shit. So the present actually resonated.’ With Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Artwork Work) (2019) – a video piece during which the artist emotes along with her fingers, at one level licking her finger and showing to wipe the display, like a mum or dad would possibly do for a kid with meals on their face – Laure Prouvost contemplates a central sense of loss, questioning what it means for the digital to exchange the bodily, when care arrives primarily by way of a display.
‘We have been emailing, and Laure mentioned, “You understand this work’s not made for people? It is made to maintain one other art work firm; you should park it in entrance of a piece that wants this caressing’’,’ shares Klap. In Groningen, it’s arrange reverse Mandy Franca’s Pale Connections (2019), a part of a wider undertaking in regards to the artist’s father that considers the way in which reminiscence capabilities, utilizing {a photograph} taken on a cell phone as a place to begin.
A substantial showcase in and of itself, ‘Pondering Arms’ was devised largely to be a prelude to 2027’s Noorderlicht Biennale, titled ‘Play’, which is able to embrace many of the artists presently current at Thea and unfold out throughout three provinces. That exhibition has been conceived partially in response to final yr’s biennale, ‘Machine Entanglements’, which explored how know-how is woven into nature, society and creativeness: ‘Play’ will search to offer a solution, or a means ahead, to among the extra troubling questions that arose.
‘With play so linked to the physique, it is fascinating to have a present [like ‘Thinking Hands’] that talks about what’s at stake and the information we nonetheless have in our our bodies, the generational information – the enjoying hand, the making hand, additionally the violent hand and the working fingers,’ says Klap.
‘Pondering Arms’ at Thea till 1 November 2026
