FIVE HANDSHAKES

Five Handshakes, a series of graphics and photographs, represents the continuation of the artist’s investigations of society and an individual in it serving as a technological tool, which she started in Tempo Tempo. However, if in the past Jahić discussed the worker’s entrapment in the manufacturing process as well as his or her subordination to machinery and norms, she now turns the logic to subject managers to measurements and technology. But how can one measure the effectiveness of their planning, organisation and supervision within a given company? Jahić decides to subject those who communicate, infuence others and lead them towards achieving organisational objectives to a test through a single gesture.

With the use of highly accurate miniature sensors, attached to the hand of a management board member, she measures the firmness of grasp and the contraction of muscles in a handshake, a gesture considered to foster successful cooperation in the business sphere. The artist flters the results and in analysing them focuses on their differences rather than similarities and translates them into a series of graphics. The abstract lines in the form of diagrams represent the motion of a hand that is drawing a line, but it can also be interpreted as its opposite: an allusion to the present time of automation and dehumanisation, a time when something so natural and vital as a contact of two hands can be transposed into a single contour.

Alenka Trebušak

In collaboration with DEWESoft
Coproduction: City Art Gallery of Ljubljana / CC Tobačna 001
Technical assistance by Andrej Primožič
Year of production: 2016