A Hand That Points Aligns the Air

A confluence of quotations material and representational, 'A Hand That Points Aligns the Air' stands as a photolithographic memento mori for the nation state.

Print is a carrier of identity, an implement of power. To print is to make ephemeral ideas tangible, to render them on the pulp of paper and to make those ideas real for others who know how to access them from the page, across oceans or generations. Printed text makes those ideas seem more permanent than they are.

Use a jeweller's loupe to look inside your passport. You'll find the obvious text, of course, enlarged-the kind you can see with the naked eye: page numbers, passport number, family name, stamps that mark the comings and goings of your individual body from the national body. But through the magnifier you'll also see a subtler text... those lines that weave themselves like intaglio marks are words. Such tiny marks can be easily dismissed as an anti-counterfeiting device... but think about this: the proper name of the country itself is encoded into its symbols. The nation's self-representation undergirds all the more oblique, open, or esoteric representations of belonging that it generates or co-opts.

Through print, the nation state acts to cement itself to the past and to outline territories for well into the future. But embodiment comes with a price—if it can age, it is therefore impermanent, soluble, negotiable, and subject to eventual, inevitable evaporation... in one form or another.

Exhibition essay by Daniella Sanader