A HISTORY OF THE HANDS
Museu de l’Art de la Pell
03.06-27.08.23
Itinerant exhibition 2022-24
“A History of the Hands” is an itinerant exhibition (2022-24) curated by Alexandra Laudo and organised by the Visual Arts Programme of the Provincial Council of Barcelona, with the collaboration of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) and the municipalities that host it.
Antoni Abad, Isabel Banal, Isabel Barios, Damià Campeny, Colita, Mirari Echávarri, Raquel Friera, Camille Henrot, Fermín Jiménez Landa, Claudi Lorenzale, Master of Cinctorres, Joan Morey, Antoni Muntadas, Levi Orta, Pasqual Ortoneda, María Sánchez, anonymous works from the 13th, 15th, 16th and 18th centuries and a selection of 20th century coins from the Numismatic Cabinet of Catalonia.
Curated by Alexandra Laudo
Guest work: “Entre Mans”, Marià Dinarès. In the art center ACVIC
From June 3 to August 27, 2023
Exhibition at the “Museu d’ Art de la Pell” (Arquebisbe Alemany, 5 Vic )
Schedules: From Tuesday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.;
Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.;
Sundays and holidays, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.;
closed Monday
Guest work in the art center ACVIC
Schedules: Tuesday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.;
Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.;
Monday, Sunday, holidays and August closed
At the Visual Arts Programme, beyond supporting local contemporary art policies within our demarcation, and similarly, at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, beyond the gathering, studying, conserving and exhibition of its repository, our mission is to connect citizens with art, to facilitate access and the generation of ideas, creativity, education and knowledge. With “A History of the Hands” we wish to share these objectives with the councils participating in this itinerant exhibition, and its visitors.
“A History of the Hands” presents a dialogue between works by contemporary artists and those from the MNAC collection. The curator, Alexandra Laudo, articulates this dialogue in nine thematic areas – Hands, authority, power; Hands, literacy, history; Hands, control, determination; Hands, work, care; Hands, money, value; Hands, the breasts, martyrdom; Hands, medicine, the sick body; Hands, desire, sin and Hands, the beginnings, the endings – and puts forward a selection of twenty-five works by the artists Antoni Abad, Isabel Banal, Isabel Barios, Damià Campeny, Colita, Mirari Echávarri, Raquel Friera, Camille Henrot, Fermín Jiménez Landa, Claudi Lorenzale, Master of Cinctorres, Joan Morey, Antoni Muntadas, Levi Orta, Pasqual Ortoneda and María Sánchez, as well as anonymous works from the 13th, 15th, 16th and 18th centuries and coins from the 20th century.
With a willingness to offer resources to visitors in order to contextualise and explore further the themes and concepts of the exhibition, “A History of the Hands” offers an educational service, related activities, a documentation space and a catalogue.
The exhibition also has different accessibility services: texts in Braille, with macro characters and easy-to-read versions, interpretation in sign language and adapted educational services.
In order to enrich this dialogue between works by contemporary artists and those from the MNAC collection, “A History of the Hands” invites the exhibition spaces participating in the tour to incorporate a local work or one linked to the municipality.
The Visual Arts Programme of the Provincial Council of Barcelona
At the origin of human history are the hands. Hands that distance themselves from the ground, which are freed from the biomechanical need to move forward touching the ground, supporting one’s own weight, and then distributed between the four limbs. Hands are also at the origin of the history of European art. Many human hands, probably women’s, are silhouetted on the wall of a cave in Cantabria, one of which, 37,300 years old, is one of the oldest cave paintings in Europe.
The exhibition “A History of the Hands” reviews some salient aspects of the cultural history of the hands and our tactile relationship with the world, based on a dialogue between contemporary works of art by current artists and a selection of pieces of Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and modern art from the collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
The collected works invite us to think about the forms of communication, production, relationship and knowledge that over time have been articulated through hands and through contact. The exhibition also focuses on our progressive evolution, in recent times, towards a digital culture in which craftsmanship coexists with forms of relationships based on finger contact and the mediation of devices and touch screens, which mitigate and transform our physical relationship with the objects, people and other elements of our environment.
Paradoxically, “A History of the Hands” explores the function of the hands and the value of touch in Western culture, but it does so through manifestations that we cannot touch. These include works of art that we are allowed to see from a certain distance and that in some cases we can also hear, but that we cannot understand or feel through touch. Although hands are also at the origin of artistic creation —as a subject of representation and, at the same time, as an element that executes this manifestation— art is almost exclusively the realm of the image and vision. In accordance with this logic and with its function of preserving cultural heritage (that is, everything that in a certain way defines us as humanity and belongs to all of us), art museums and, in general, all museum institutions have become places where sight is prioritised over any other sense; a distance from the observed objects is imposed and touch is prohibited.
Touch, in addition to providing us with information about the texture, weight, temperature and consistency of what we are touching, gives us the intensity and intimacy of a physical encounter. It even offers us the possibility of establishing a kind of deferred contact with all those before us who have previously touched what we touch now, an illusory evasion of the irreversibility of death, time and space. Throughout our existence we constantly touch skin, objects and surfaces that have been touched before, many of which will likely continue to be touched by other hands, both familiar and unfamiliar.
From this perspective, we can think of hands and touch as a sense that, through skin which is caressed, through surfaces that have been touched and palpated, unites humanity throughout time and in the distance of the spaces.
It reminded us that touch is a form of reciprocity, that touching always equals being touched. To touch is to leave a part of us on the surface of the world and of others. It is also, at the same time, to change, to mutate, to be transformed in this contact that alters our individuality and allows us to be, momentarily, a plural singularity.
Alexandra Laudo [Heroines of Culture]
