The Hand that Sings
2021Bilbao-born artist Alex Reynolds, currently living in Brussels, creates her work experimenting with film and performance, also resorting to installation, text, photography, and conceptual pieces. In the convergence of this wide range of disciplines, she somehow redefines the cinematic language, understood by Reynolds essentially as a collaborative medium.
Reynolds’s creative practice focuses on the exploration of the modes of relation and affection, altering the narrative or the script to the situations that instigate the act of filming or emerge out of it. As a result, the identity of Reynolds’s characters expands in her stories, as if each individual scene broadened the range of possible actions instead of leading to a goal or a denouement in the plot. Every aspect of her film language—sound, image, rhythm, acting, viewing—feeds on open association, contributing to the tension between multiple levels: the film itself, the place where it is being shown, and the works that share the exhibition space. The result breaks away from the filmmaking conventions, transforming perception into an act of active responsibility.
The Hand that Sings (2021) is a co-production of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, commissioned for There Is a Law, There Is a Hand, There Is a Song , an exhibition of the Museum’s Film & Video program. The starting point is a conversation between Reynolds and Swedish choreographer Alma Söderberg, along with the voice of sculptor Julia Spínola. The Hand That Sings builds a network of gestures, words, and visions that seem to be both a response and a provocation over time. A gesture is followed by a word or a whisper; images reverberate in other images or in the sound of music. As a result, the cork extraction ritual in Extremadura becomes akin to the act of peeling an orange by the crackling fire, and then to the act of washing the hand that first peeled the orange. Likewise, trembling leaves and trembling voices work together to tune each other. A common thread can be identified: a form of friendship, a shared feeling that creates experiences and intuitions. The open-ended sequences show how places, actions, and camera shots feed on each other. Both free-form and minutely composed, The Hand that Sings is a piece, where resistance to stillness and interest in transformation appeal to all our senses.
Original title
The Hand that Sings
Date
2021
Medium/Materials
Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 22 min. 41 sec. Edition 1/5 + 2 AP
Credit line
Made in collaboration with Alma Södeberg Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa