Reading Lewis Hyde
2024
single-channel video
24 minutes
Variable installation
Edition 5 + 1 AP

This piece was produced by the Tangenten St. Pölten festival.


Thinking through American essayist and cultural critic, Lewis Hyde’s book, A Primer for Forgetting (2019), the artist guides a conversation by applying the rudiments of palmistry that she forced herself to learn in order to carry out an intimate portrait of the author in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A correlation is made between the Orphic rivers of the underworld, Lethe (oblivion) and Mnemosyne (remembrance) and the lines on the hand, imagining the palm as a map of rivers, tributaries, deltas, and dams. Civilizations may have dominantly formed around rivers, delineating borders, but to its credit a river never chooses sides. Despite this, or in part perhaps because of this, rivers as geological features are great at beckoning narratives that attach meaning to them—between what they do (flow) and what we are (mortal). Unlike divination practices such as tarot card reading, touch belongs to chiromancy's ascertainment of one’s past, present and destiny. In reading Lewis Hyde’s palms, the artist arouses stories around personal and historical myth, memory and the politics of "getting past the past."


Photo credit: 
Simon Veres 
Peter Rauchecker (exhibition opening)


Exhibition History

The Way of the Water, Tangente St. Pölten festival, St. Pölten, 2024


Reviews

Robles de Medina, Xavier. “Swimming Upstream. The Way of the Water...“ Passe-Avant. June 07, 2024. Web
link / pdf