The Hands of Gods
OVERVIEW
Title: The Hands of Gods
Year: 2025
Format: Short film (5:54) + sculptural installation
Materials: Bottled water, mango boxes, family photos, iPhone
Dimensions: Variable
Themes: Gesture, left-handedness, ritual, surveillance, caste, colonial discipline, diaspora memory
Premiere: European debut at Art Basel 2025 (Atelier Mondial — Wild at Art)
Press: Featured in ART AFRICA Magazine — “The Table Remembers: Jonah Batambuze on Ritual, Refusal and the Left Hand”
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A left-handed altar built from memory, diaspora ritual, and refusal.The Hands of Gods sits at the core of BlindianProject’s Art & Research practice. The work remixes family archive, sound collage, and everyday domestic materials into a sensory site where gesture becomes testimony and the body becomes an archive of caste, colonial discipline, and care.
Through the simple act of eating with the left hand — once disciplined by empire and religion — the installation asks how our movements are shaped by power, and how they become acts of resistance across Black × South Asian worlds. A table becomes a stage. A meal becomes refusal. A left-handed gesture becomes language.
Through interviews with women from Nigeria, England, the U.S., and India, one truth kept returning: left-handed stigma isn’t local — it’s global. It moves across race, religion, and caste, shaping how bodies are disciplined and how gestures are inherited. The left hand becomes a shared site of memory, shame, and refusal.
Throughout the installation, an iPhone quietly pointed at guests, echoing the surveillance that has long surrounded the left hand in both religious and social life. The glitchy feedback loop turned the room into both shrine and spectacle — a live archive of how people respond when the “wrong” hand becomes sacred again.
This is not just a film. It is a living archive.A communal remembering.A refusal in ritual form.A small gesture that reveals a larger world.
THEMES & RESEARCH
These are the research constellations shaping the work:
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Left-handedness as a global site of colonial and religious discipline
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Gesture, ritual, and the politics of everyday movement
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Diaspora food memory and the table as an archive
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Surveillance within domestic and social space
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Black × South Asian entanglements across caste and imperial histories
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The body as a carrier of inherited violence and refusal
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Family archive and intergenerational storytelling
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Glitch aesthetics as a method of disrupting the colonial gaze
EXHIBITION HISTORY
2025 — Art Basel (Atelier Mondial, Wild at Art Exhibition)
European debut of The Hands of Gods, presented as a sculptural installation and short film exploring left-handedness, ritual, and embodied refusal.