Your Hand Opens and Closes and Opens and Closes, 1999/2023

your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralysed.
extract from Birdwings by Jelaluddin Rumi

Your Hand Opens and Closes and Opens and Closes is a video and sound collaboration between Virginia Hilyard and Varsha Nair. Through the depiction of massage and boxing, 'your hand…’ addresses tensions that lurk beneath the skin, disguised by a culture driven by surface calm and beauty. The movement between strength and vulnerability, traversed in slow motion, is left open to interpretation within and beyond the frame. 

With sound design by Kaiwan Kulavadhanothai, the video has been installed at 24HR Art, Darwin (2000), Cities on the Move 6, Bangkok (2000), Artspace, Sydney (1999), as well as Womanifesto II: The Second International Women’s Art Exchange, Bangkok (1999). Its installation in Womanifesto II involved a fabric screen stretched across a pond in Saranrom Park with video projected onto its surface. Most recently, the projection appeared at the 2023 exhibition Womanifesto: Flowing Connections projected onto the walls of the Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre.