Hands are never tied in Laïla Mestari’s photographs. They move around, they meet one another, they detach themselves and get reattached. As though on a quest for autonomy, they seem like they want to cut themselves off from the body at all costs, to be among themselves and construct their own universe (like the ear, which also will try and find a better place than the head for listening). Through the transformation of the body into an image, the artist also makes it into a material that she can tear and cut, without ever harming it. With skin becoming paper, the body is interwoven with its own image, and multiplies in rhymes and refrains. The fabricated scenes are played in the realm of sensations, where it is also possible to end up with orange peels in our hair.
The images in the exhibition were printed at VU during her residency in December 2018.