The Hands of Gods Debuts at Art Basel Switzerland | June 18–22, 2025
- blindianproject2020
- 16 hours ago
- 2 min read
WASHINGTON, D.C. — May 21, 2025 — The Hands of Gods, a 5:54-minute looping short and sculptural installation by Jonah Batambuze, makes its European debut at Atelier Mondial, Basel during Art Basel week, June 18–22, 2025. Presented as part of the Wild at Art group exhibition curated by Rama Kalidindi, the work explores decolonial legacies, migration, and radical imagination.
Shot in point-of-view, the film immerses viewers in the lived tension of using the “wrong” hand to eat — interrogating how colonial codes persist in everyday rituals. It reflects on how colonialism shaped bodily norms: how we eat, pray, sit, and move — and how those norms long after conquest. Rooted in the artist’s Black Ugandan–South Indian household, The Hands of Gods gathers people—real or remembered—around the intimacy of a meal:
In how food is eaten
Who gets corrected
What is swallowed
And what is silenced.
The Hands of Gods is a ritual you eat through. A memory that glitches. A table that remembers you before you had language for who you were.
“This work confronts how colonial residue still lives inside the domestic, the culinary, the habitual,” said artist Jonah Batambuze. “It’s a meditation on marginalization that doesn’t beg for recognition — it designs its own table.”
The Hands of Gods is rooted in lived experience and cultural friction. It expands Batambuze’s broader cultural practice as founder of the BlindianProject, a global platform exploring the layered realities of Black x Brown life to build solidarity. Anchored by film, the work now expands into space — where everyday rituals of nourishment and memory become tools of cultural preservation and decolonial imagination.
Follow @BlindianProject for activations and updates. For interviews or advance preview requests of The Hands of Gods, contact Jacqueline Lara at jacquelinel@mpactpr.com.
-30-
About the Artist
Jonah Batambuze is a Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist, cultural architect, and community builder remixing diaspora and identity into radical narratives of connection. As the founder of BlindianProject and lead for South Asians for Black Lives, he spearheads a global movement of 70,000+, using culture as a catalyst for solidarity and change.
Batambuze’s work spans art, activism, and daily life, earning a Metal Culture UK Artist Residency (2021/22) and a curatorial role at Dortmund Goes Black (2023), where he premiered his first short film. His work has been featured on the BBC, ITV, Fatherly, Psychology Today, Times of India and more. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford, UCLA, St. Johns, Stanford, and SOAS among others.
Comments