Today marks the opening of a new museum of the hand. You are very welcome. The museum collects anything relating to the hands (and/or divination). For example: old gloves, photographs of hands (new or found), significant nail varnishes, slips from mechanical fortune tellers, models of fists, handprints (new or found), discarded lottery tickets, religious objects, art works (new or found), tools, erotic objects, old jewellery, children’s drawings. It also wants to think about archiving gesture, and has a particular interest in questions of gender and sexuality.
Deposits and submissions are open and welcomed. Post to Sam Dolbear (keeper of the museum), C/O ICI Berlin, Christinenstraße 18/19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin, with a short description of the object, its origins and significance, and the object itself. You can also fill out this form. Postal costs can be reimbursed. There is no deadline for submissions. Once received, the object will be catalogued and stored, and exhibited digitally and potentially in person at some point. For an appointment to view the museum, please contact sam.dolbear@ici-berlin.org. Feel free to share with anyone who would perhaps like to attend the museum and/or submit an object.
A number of objects have already been catalogued for today’s launch. Please enjoy your visit:
1.
Catalogue number: 11.656
Object: Thumb glove
Description: “[…] I remember going to a pool hall in Beijing some time in 2007. After having paid at the front desk you were offered a tiny set of white cotton gloves. I was into gloves, all sorts of gloves, probably because they hide my fingers [after I’ve picked them], and they're soft. Many years later I stole my mother's sewing machine and went through an intense period trying to make a shirt from a pattern. It took many months and broke many needles but it was at that time when the idea of the thumb glove came to me and I ordered a bag of white snooker gloves. I thought they would quickly get visibly grubby so I started by dying them with a mixture of blue and black dye. I chopped off the fingers so only the thumb and wrist section remained and adjusted them to fit my hands. I think I had maybe 12 thumb gloves in total. The one I have donated to the hand archive is 1 of 2 remaining. There was a period when I wore them all the time – they looked very cool and they worked to protect my thumbs for a while. People sometimes stopped me in public – other thumb pickers usually – and asked me about them, where i got them from etc. Sadly they didn't break my habit but I they definitely helped me manage the problem. […]”
Date of submission: 20 October 2020
Provenance: Lucy Duncan
2.
Catalogue number: 35.198
Object: Self-analysis with a chirometer
Description: A self-analysis using a chirometer as a guide, after this post.
Date of submission: 25 February 2021
Provenance: Received from Georgia Anderson in the post
3.
Catalogue number: 96.173
Description: “A drawstring bag, the size of a glasses case …
The bag is silky, smooth to touch, in royal blue. The string is bright orange. These are complementary colours on the colour wheel. When I bought my Optase HydroBead™ Technology eye mask from Boots in Liverpool Street station towards the end of last year, there was no hint on the packaging that such a bag would be inside. The bag looked as though it belonged to the world of boxing – boxing shorts cut from the same shiny blue, with orange piping running down the seams on the outer thighs. An orange lined and draw-strung elasticated waist. The eye mask itself is more scientific: white with a velcro strap to fix it behind the head, and with a pale blue trim that runs across the brows. I keep it now in a tupperware box, ready to heat for 40 seconds in the microwave (it can get very hot very fast). I should use this mask every day, morning and night, as part of an eye care routine to treat blepharitis, where the oil glands around the eyelashes get blocked and cause the eyelids to swell, itch and flake etc. I am often lazy and then regret it when my eyes get dry and even gritty; when they don’t self-clean I have to bathe them and get rid of stringy mucus using a cotton bud. Probably the blepharitis was brought on by not sleeping much through the summer of 2019, when I was on a kind of high, and then by crying too much through February, causing a build up of pressure. Either that, and/or too much time not blinking, sat close up to work at a screen. Initially my object [of submission to the museum] would have been a Nikon case for a camera I bought on eBay to photograph all the London Prets. This camera didn’t work; the film would not load. And then I caught sight of the drawstring bag and thought about its texture, how it feels, and how when I wear the mask I cannot see.”
Date of submission: 26 July 2020
Provenance: Lizzie Homersham
4.
Catalogue number: 11.263
Object: Poster from Phile magazine, issue 3, FW 2018, photography by Molly Matalon
Description: “On 1 March 2021, I went for a morning trip to the Bio beneath our flat. As I checked for mail on my way back, I found a whole set of keys, left in someone’s postbox. Given the keys were associated with a flat number, I decided to run upstairs, write a quick note explaining that I found some keys and to come and collect them from the first flat on the left on the fifth floor. About five minutes later, there was a knock at the door. I opened the door, and returned the keys to the person. About five minutes later there was another knock at the door and the same person passed through an old book about Naples. I said thank you, wished them a good day and took the book inside. I then opened the book and found €50 nestled inside.
I was so touched but confused what to do with the money. I decided to spend the money all in one go on things I wouldn’t normally buy. I decided to go to this gay bookshop near Nollendorfplatz to buy a magazine I had my eye on that turned out to be in the sale. The poster than I am donating to the collection was inside the magazine. I also got a Rosa von Praunheim calendar and a tube of Weleda Skin Food from another Bio opposite to the bookshop.”
Date of submission: 5 May 2021
Provenance: Sam Dolbear via an anonymous neighbour via Prinz Eisenherz bookshop (Motzstraße 23, 10777 Berlin)
5.
Catalogue number: 34.861
Object: Sri Durga Astrology Centre Leaflet
Description: I like to take leaflets from the street and picked this up on Ridley Road Market with my friend Lizzie. We both had our readings taken. I was told via shells that my lucky number was 14 and that I should only have 15 friends. Lizzie was told she would live until 97 and that she might open a Spanish restaurant in the next couple of years. More details here.
Date of submission: 5 May 2021
Provenance: Handed to Sam Dolbear on Ridley Road Market on November 15
6.
Catalogue number: 25.637
Object: Pebble engraved the words ‘in the hands of the proletariat’
Description: i was in Glasgow a few years ago and went to the Glasgow Women's Library to have a look around. there had just been an exhibition by Fiona Jack about her great aunt, prominent Scottish activist and suffragette Helen Crawfurd (née Jack). i got a few of these stones, gave them away to friends, and this is the only one left.
Date of submission: 5 May 2021
Provenance: from Glasgow Women's Library from the 2018 exhibition Our Red Aunt
7.
Catalogue number: 67.368
Object: Yellow cube
Description: My friend Henry gave me this. I think it must have come from a toddler’s set of wooden toy building bricks, the classic sets of different shapes and colours with some half moons, some triangles, some columns, cubes, etc. We’ve been friends for about twenty years, and have seen each other I would say only five or six times within the last ten of those. I believe we’re telepathically connected, and that we both (silently) agree on this. I also believe we’ve agreed on this since we first met as teenagers, and that the only reason we’ve never actually discussed it as such is that we both know that naming it would stop it from working (extremely unlikely he’ll read this). He gave me this the last time I saw him—he didn’t say anything about it, just placed it in my hand while I was talking, and for obvious reasons it would have been absurdly rude to ask him what it was, or what was going on. Often find this with intensely telepathic friends? So just solemnly received it and continued. I was also very late (an hour late) to arrive because I’d been in the audience of a conversation between filmmaker-turned-professional psychic Alice Anne Parker, who lives in Hawaii so was being live-streamed, and Herb—who at the time I’d never met, but who a year or so later took a room in the house I was living in. It ran way over but I felt trapped because AAP kept making comments on the audience’s clothing (too much of it black, which is bad for your soul) while projected very large above us with her face very close to the screen, so it was clear she’d see me leave and I thought she might heckle me. When I looked up the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz the next day I learned that it supposedly represents America’s transition to the gold standard, but also ‘the course of action a person takes believing it will lead to good things’—which makes following it sort of incompatible with fate, and presumably with palm reading too.
Date of submission: 26 July 2020
Provenance: Kat Black
Notes: Thank you to everyone who already submitted an object to the museum already. Some remain that need cataloguing. I would love to receive objects from far and wide so please share this post if you feel able. The museum would like to have a logo, and membership cards at some point. The museum also needs a better name. At some point I wonder if the museum might host a performance.
Thank you for coming to the launch!! ♥︎