GRONINGEN.- As technology increasingly thinks and decides for us, Thinking Hands investigates what the body actually still knows. From September 12 through November 1, 2026, Noorderlicht brings together photography, video, and installations centered on the knowledge embodied in our hands, bodies, and gestures. The exhibition will take place at THEA, the new art space in the former Niemeyer tobacco factory in Groningen, serving as the prelude to the Noorderlicht Biennale PLAY (Summer 2027).

Often, the body knows something before the mind does: the seamstress recognizes a fabric by its pressure and resistance, the dancer feels the floor through their feet, the surgeon feels with her hands what her eyes cannot see. It is this kind of knowledge—which the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa called "the thinking hand"—that Thinking Hands puts center stage at a moment when big tech companies are building systems to think and choose for us.

In his portrait series Talking Hands, Paul Kooiker shows how people speak with their hands, where hands clarify what they want to say. Close-ups show hands turning, kneading, and opening clay: pottery as the ultimate physical form of knowledge that emerges only through repetition and failure, until the body suddenly understands what the mind could never explain.

In the salvaged portraits by Martina Bacigalupo—rescued from a waste container in a photo studio in Gulu, Uganda—a body without a face still reveals everything: how someone sits, how their shoulders are held, and what their hands are doing at the moment the photograph is taken.

From there, the exhibition shifts to the kitchen and the home, where that same embodied knowledge acquires a political charge. In Martha Rosler’s classic Semiotics of the Kitchen, the artist presents kitchen utensils alphabetically, using gestures that gradually become stranger and angrier until the cooking demonstration unmasks itself as a catalog of imposed bodily knowledge.





In Taking Care (Love letter to a fellow art work), Laure Prouvost whispers a promise as hands move across the frame, asking what happens to care when the supporting hand becomes a screen. Here, Thinking Handsreveals its core conviction: that touch, care, and love are forms of knowledge and resistance against a world primarily focused on output and performance.

Jane Jin Kaisen also presents care as something bridging generations. For Halmang, she filmed eight women in their seventies and eighties along the coast of Jeju Island who have worked together all their lives as haenyeo—the free divers who make their living from the sea. The camera remains close to their hands as they handle sochang, the long white cotton cloth tied to women’s labor and the cycle of life and death. Gradually, they tie the bolts together into one large spiral laid out over the black lava rocks. It is a gesture no one needs to explain: these hands know what to do because it has always been done this way—by these women, by their mothers, and by the goddesses called halmang.

Play and the digital screen form the final chapter, where the exhibition's central question is framed most sharply. At the heart of the room stands Kvam/Oldereid’s four-meter-tall, armless robot. It cannot move. What it can do is speak, utilizing a hyper-realistic projected face and a voice synthesized via AI and human performance. It speaks of genocide and contemporary displacement, asking whether such violence is a tragic exception in human history or a recurring pattern. It has no hands. Yet, it is the work of hands that built it, programmed it, and gave it the words it speaks. This is where the urgency lies: when a system speaks about the worst things humans have done to one another, who bears responsibility for what is said? Kvam/Oldereid received the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica in Linz for Requiem for an Exit.

In contrast, Chelsi Alise Cocking playfully restores the body to the center. In Illuminate, the movements of the visitor in a darkened room are tracked via computer vision—without needing to wear any equipment—and converted into glowing trails that seem to float through the space. Speed, direction, and acceleration all drive the imagery. The body becomes its own luminous paintbrush, and visitors discover through play that they have always known more than they could explain.

Participating artists include: Andi Gáldi Vinkó, Chelsi Alise Cocking, Devlin Claro, Frida Orupabo, Jan Robert Leegte, Jane Jin Kaisen, Kévin Bray, Kiki Mager, Kvam/Oldereid, Laure Prouvost, Lisa Oppenheim, Loïe Fuller, Mandy Franca, Martha Rosler, Martina Bacigalupo, Paul Kooiker, Robin de Puy / Strijbos & van Rijswijk, Vera van der Burg, Xhanti Zwelendaba & Ben Stanwix.

Curated by: Musoke Nalwoga and Roosje Klap