Heavy Hands (The Stroker and Sign)

“Play and Loop II” is the second iteration of an eight-week screening programme at Blindspot Gallery, featuring works by 18 regional and international artists. Each week, video works by two artists will be featured and played continuously on loop during the opening hours of the gallery. The selected works congeal into weekly themes pertinent to our current states of affairs and being. Sedimenting, speculating and fantasizing, these weekly artwork pairings become navigation points between an unruly past and an uncertain future.
The opening week is themed “Heavy Hands”, featuring Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker (2018) and Leung Chi Wo’s Sign (2008). In a time when the world reels from the hygienic isolation of COVID-19, we start to recalibrate the practice of human touch and technologies of communication. “Heavy Hands” recognizes the biopolitical potential of the human hand, and speculates on its radical capacity to affect, ideologize and subvert normative human interaction.
The Stroker captures Takala’s infiltration of a trendy East London coworking space, where she strolls around the workspace and lightly touches other members in a friendly manner. These “touching” encounters are mostly cordial, but in time gestures of affectation become sites of negotiation and negation, betraying the plasticity of the boundaries between self and world.
Leung Chi Wo’s Sign is a two-part video exploring the use of sign language between infant and parents. Part one features a deaf teacher demonstrating basic signs in Australian Sign Language (Auslan) with which parents can learn to communicate with their children starting at 6-month-old, with phrases such as “You wet?”, “You poo?”, “want milk?”, “No”, “Yes”, and “Ta! (thank you)”. Part two is a fictional account of a mother signing to her baby, conveying vocabularies she came across daily in The Canberra Times, which can be discomforting and harsh, a heavy preparation for the infant’s life to come.
The opening event will incorporate a sign language workshop in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) with artist Leung Chi Wo and deaf teacher Aaron Wong, interpreting a series of keywords the artist has encountered lately describing current affairs in different local newspapers.