Thinking Hands: Groningen's THEA Asks What the Body Knows

A visitor, moved to tears by an exhibition about the extraction economy behind technology, asked curator Roosje Klap a question she could not shake: "Is there any hope? Because I don't see any hope, only sadness and terrible feelings." Her answer is now on the wall — the exhibition Thinking Hands at THEA in Groningen, Netherlands, running until 1 November.

The encounter took place during last year's Noorderlicht Biennale, themed Machine Entanglements, which included exhibitions by 75 artists across the northern Dutch city and explored, in Klap's words, "how we now live, eat, sleep, dream and even date through technology." Klap is director of Noorderlicht, the platform for photography and lens-based media. The shows at THEA focused on extraction — the "ugly monster" which makes technology, as she puts it. "That's when I started to wonder, what's the way out?" she says. "There must be a way out, how can we escape, or what's the antidote?"

Curated by Klap with Musoke Nalwoga, Thinking Hands gathers still and moving work that probes how embodied knowledge endures in an ever-more technological age. Paul Kooiker's series Talking Hands takes a playful look at body language. Martina Bacigalupo's found series Gulu Real Art Studio consists of studio portraits from which the heads were clipped out to make passport photos; without the face as a focal point, attention falls to the sitters' hands and postures, and what they express.

Andi Gáldi Vinkó's Sorry I Gave Birth I Disappeared But Now I'm Back explores the deeply embodied experience of early motherhood, when the baby is technically separate but often 'joined at the hip.' A generation earlier, Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen rethinks cookery skills as enforced, internalised physical socialisation. Laure Prouvost's Taking Care (Love letter to a fellow art work) casts the artist as art handler, addressing a viewer as though he or she were a painting or object. Requiem for an Exit by Kvam/Oldereid shows an eerie armless robot whose disembodied projected face and AI-generated voice speak of genocide and human displacement.

Klap's own stake in the argument is precise. "All the thinking that is somehow stored within the body, all the knowledge that isn't necessarily in the head, that's what makes us human," she says. Photography belongs to that process too. "The apparatus is part of the body, and the decision to make that photo – yes or no – is also an embodied decision," she says. "I think it is really a mind/body-correlative decision, and I feel that's very much at the basis of what's at stake now [as technology expands], because we are taking ourselves out of that whole system."

THEA occupies some 8,000 square metres over three floors of the Niemeyer, a former tobacco factory being converted into a public culture and tech hub. Backed by the Mondriaan Fund and the City of Groningen, the two-year startup is co-developed by Klap with Rosa Wevers, an independent curator and senior researcher in Art & Technology at Hanze University. Klap also serves as Cultural Development Lead at Niemeyer. She says she is "here to stay."

The venue sits alongside initiatives including the AI Factory, part of an EU-backed network using AI to research healthcare and agriculture with privacy, security and digital sovereignty in mind. "The AI Factories are being put into place as alternatives to big tech, so they are interesting and important," says Klap. "But that's where THEA is important too. That work is all happening in computers; we can help make it more visible. We can also be a critical little sister to Big Brother and the tech bros."

THEA takes its name from Theodora Niemeyer, daughter of tobacco founder Theodorous Niemeyer. Born in 1912, she rejected bourgeois life, moved to The Hague, became a painter and used her inheritance to create an art fund. The programme in her honour spans three strands: art and technology; care and technology, including symposia and critical thinking; and make and technology, including a hackerspace.

Next summer THEA will be a key venue for the Noorderlicht Biennale, themed PLAY and again curated by Klap and Nalwoga, spread across six or seven locations in Groningen city and province. Klap plans to look beyond gaming culture: she wants to include Debi Cornwall's Necessary Fictions / Model Citizens, which examine Hollywood film tropes and the stereotypes that shape our reactions without conscious awareness. For Klap, Groningen — "the red heart of the Netherlands" — is the right base: "Something I find really great here is that I don't have to explain to politicians that culture is important for society."