These Hands

Description:

These Hands was an exhibition of films organized around labour—how it’s imagined, mythologized, and represented. Ranging from ethnographic studies to structural experiments, the films in These Hands focused on visualizing the role of women as labourers in conditions where their work is often undervalued. Focusing on union organizing, cooperative work models, and matriarchal collectives, These Hands aimed to critique pre-existing terms of employment to reimagine the economies of women’s labour. 

The exhibition featured two films that were screened in the gallery throughout the exhibition. Laura Huertas Millán’s film La Libertad (2017) follows the Navarros, a matriarchal family of Zapotec weavers in Santo Tomás Jalieza, Mexico. Producing textiles on pre-Hispanic backstrap looms, the film showcases how the weavers’ ancestral practice is central to their sense of personal and economic freedom. The formal structure of La Libertad parallels their work, weaving together fragmented images of labour, domesticity, and resistance to articulate the significance of this traditionally feminine form of labour to Indigenous sovereignty. 

Coney Island Baby (2018) was a collaborative film project by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill with artists Jeneen Frei Njootli, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Tania Willard, and cinematographers Amy Kazymerchyk and Aaron Leon. Filmed in 2016 during a winter visit to BUSH Gallery on the territory of the Secwépemc Nation in the interior of British Columbia, the film follows the four artists as they learn how to trap rabbits—a traditional practice that is often feminized and diminished despite being a vital skill set in some Indigenous communities. Taking place in the snowy woodland and within the domestic space of a kitchen, Coney Island Baby captures the complexities of invisible labour to propose an economy of care and relationality in opposition to capitalism. Playing on the depiction of rabbit hunting in popular culture, the film was accompanied by a mural at the gallery entrance that referenced the coloured concentric circles that appear in the opening credits of Looney Tunes. 

Rabbit stew was served at the exhibition opening and every Friday during gallery hours. Programming included two double bill screenings of These Hands (1992) by Flora M’mbugu-Schelling, and Nightcleaners (1975) by Berwick Street Collective, as well as an artist talk with Laura Huertas Millán, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and Chandra Melting Tallow. 

Curated by Pablo de Ocampo.

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