(5) Take My Hand
(5) Take My Hand is an evolving multisensory installation and artistic research touching on the old and persistent impulse to make and use symbols, objects, gestures and rituals invoking protection. Rooted in my intimate and inherited relationship with the Hamsa/Khamsa, the work has grown through relationships with other technologies of protection.
While the project considers protection as intimate and collective, material and spiritual, desired and contradictory, the works do not only reflect on protective practices; they are themselves attempts at protection.
The project approaches protection as relational, shaped through reciprocity, interdependence, care, gesture and attention, and by the ways bodies, objects, materials and places affect and are affected by one another. It asks how protective forms are inherited, carried, transformed, and reactivated, while leaving room for belief, doubt, and uncertainty, and for forms of relation whose effects cannot always be seen, measured, or explained.
The project was supported in 2025 with a one-year multidisciplinary artist’s grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
Views of (5) Take My Hand in Held Meanings, Gallery Valve, Oulu, 2026.
While the project considers protection as intimate and collective, material and spiritual, desired and contradictory, the works do not only reflect on protective practices; they are themselves attempts at protection.
The project approaches protection as relational, shaped through reciprocity, interdependence, care, gesture and attention, and by the ways bodies, objects, materials and places affect and are affected by one another. It asks how protective forms are inherited, carried, transformed, and reactivated, while leaving room for belief, doubt, and uncertainty, and for forms of relation whose effects cannot always be seen, measured, or explained.
The project was supported in 2025 with a one-year multidisciplinary artist’s grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
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Below Image of Kemê during the (5) Take My Hand’s Process:
The research around (5) Take My Hand began in 2024 through studio work, personal and family research, and a growing awareness of the interdependencies within my inherited relationship with the Hamsa/Khamsa and other protection technologies. During 2025, it expanded through material and sensory experimentation, conversations and both public and intimate encounters with others.
In 2026, the project continued to evolve through its iteration in Held Meanings at Gallery Valve in Oulu and through workshops and exchanges with visitors, bringing new questions about protection, reciprocity, memory, hope and interdependence into the work.
With gratitude to Catalysti ry for its support with the project’s public workshops, and to all those who have supported and accompanied me and the work throughout this time, whether physically close or far away.
To the memory of my father’s hands.
