In his 2009 book The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa considers the disconnect between the mind and body as a result of the prioritising of the virtual and the visual, re-examining, over several chapters, the significance of the information a body inherently knows. This is the cornerstone of the first show to be staged at Thea, a new exhibition space focusing on art and technology from photography platform Noorderlicht in Groningen. Adopting the moniker from Pallasmaa’s text, ‘Thinking Hands’ (until 1 November 2026) brings together 23 photographers and lens-based artists and artist duos, working both with traditional techniques and digital programmes, to further interrogate these ideas.
In the days immediately prior to opening, neighbours were invited in for a preview. One of these early visitors, recalls general and artistic director Roosje Klap, was quick to share their surprise in finding the space not filled solely with photographs of hands. ‘That would be really boring, wouldn’t it?’ asserts Klap. ‘It is funny what people expect.’ There are, however, plenty of hands, fingers and forearms captured in close-up throughout Thea, which occupies some 8,000 sq m of Niemeyer, a former tobacco factory currently in development as a major new culture and tech centre (of which Klap is cultural development lead).
In the 1934 short film, Hands, for example, authored by filmmakers Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke for the Works Progress Administration – part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, it employed millions of jobseekers in public works projects – the camera closely observes as people write cheques, tie bandages and hammer nails, without revealing anyone’s identity. Paul Kooiker’s 2023 music video for ‘Ze is pas net begonnen’, by the Dutch band De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig, similarly zooms in: in Kooiker’s trademark grey palette, over four minutes and eight seconds, a pottery wheel spins as a series of hands knead, shape, and open the clay, to varying levels of eroticism.
Nearby, under the banner ‘The Unseen Hand’ (the show is divided into five sections, each focused on a way the body shows what it knows), Kiki Mager’s 5000times (2016) recreates footage from a manufacturing facility in Shenzhen, using animation to highlight the invisible labour of a single pair of hands over one day, during the production of smartphones, tablets and laptops. In ‘The Language of Touch’, Koos Breukel’s The Hands of Sally Mann (2008) centres the American photographer’s hands, her nails stained and dirty from darkroom chemicals, in place of a traditional front-facing portrait, while Andi Gáldi Vinkó’s Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I’m Back (2016-2022), featuring a mix of large framed photographs and 6x4-inch pictures attached to the wall with delicate pink tape, examines the early stages of motherhood, highlighting the body’s intrinsic understanding of (and dealing with) care and comfort.
‘Intellectual knowledge always has been better knowledge, right? It's a higher knowledge. But I'm starting to think that maybe bodily knowledge is actually better,’ reflects Klap, who curated the show with Musoke Nalwoga. ‘The cognitive knowledge can be mimicked, but something that we know in our body, to really have that great intuition, it's not really a cognitive thing. Pallasmaa gave examples like how to sit in a chair, how to walk, and I also thought about for instance, ceramics. If you’ve ever done a pottery course, it's really difficult. This thing is rotating, your clay is going everywhere. But all of a sudden, you can do it, your body has learned.
‘The artists,’ she continues, ‘really understand the urgency of what's at stake right now and I feel, as a profession, they see we're losing shit. So the show really resonated.’ With Taking Care (Love Letter to Fellow Art Work) (2019) – a video piece in which the artist emotes with her hands, at one point licking her finger and appearing to wipe the screen, like a parent might do for a child with food on their face – Laure Prouvost contemplates a central sense of loss, questioning what it means for the digital to replace the physical, when care arrives primarily through a screen.
‘We were emailing, and Laure said, "You know this work's not made for humans? It's made to keep another artwork company; you need to park it in front of a work that needs this caressing’’,’ shares Klap. In Groningen, it is set up opposite Mandy Franca’s Faded Connections (2019), part of a wider project about the artist’s father that considers the way memory functions, using a photograph taken on a mobile phone as a starting point.
A considerable showcase in and of itself, ‘Thinking Hands’ was devised largely to be a prelude to 2027’s Noorderlicht Biennale, titled ‘Play’, which will include most of the artists currently present at Thea and spread out across three provinces. That exhibition has been conceived in part in response to last year’s biennale, ‘Machine Entanglements’, which explored how technology is woven into nature, society and imagination: ‘Play’ will seek to provide an answer, or a way forward, to some of the more troubling questions that arose.
‘With play so connected to the body, it's interesting to have a show [like ‘Thinking Hands’] that talks about what's at stake and the knowledge we still have in our bodies, the generational knowledge – the playing hand, the making hand, also the violent hand and the working hands,’ says Klap.
'Thinking Hands' at Thea until 1 November 2026
