The sprawling, immersive floor-to-ceiling installation of prints, The Hands that Write History aims to trace the connections between white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, warfare, and institutionalized, structural violence.

It features hundreds of close-up prints of white male hands executing a variety of seemingly mundane gestures and tasks. Taken from the contexts of archaeology, art history, bureaucracy, racial science, technology, finance, military and warfare, the tasks include the handling of weapons, the excavation of artifacts as well as quantitative processes such as measuring, classifying, and ordering.

The hands’ owners are unidentifiable and anonymous, while the arrangement of images is marked by a formal repetition in order to point to the all-pervasive ideological mechanisms operating in our everyday lives, and reveal the dominant Western, patriarchal power relations embedded in administration, global politics, finance, science and technology.