What the Hands Know: Paris, France

The Bridge Gallery is pleased to present What the Hands Know, a duo exhibition bringing together for the first time Ava Binta Giallo and Bulumko Mbete.

Born in 1995, both artists develop practices grounded in material research and embodied knowledge. This exhibition marks Giallo’s first presentation with the gallery and Mbete’s second. Bringing together new textile and sculptural works by Mbete and tempera paintings on canvas produced by Giallo between 2023 and 2025, the exhibition focuses on a shared question: how does the hand carry memory?

The title suggests a form of knowledge that exists prior to language. In both practices, gesture functions as a repository. Through repetition and contact with matter, experience becomes embedded in surface and fibre. 

Giallo’s recent tempera paintings extend her sustained engagement with abstraction and atmosphere. Working in thin, patient layers, she builds fields of colour that appear suspended between opacity and translucence. Light seems to settle within the canvas. Forms hover at the edge of visibility, emerging through accumulation rather than outline. Her approach to painting draws from the history of abstraction while shifting its emphasis toward intimacy and permeability. The surface reads as a site of duration, where each application of pigment leaves a subtle residue of time. 

Mbete’s new works deepen her exploration of textile as archive. Incorporating indigo dye, bull denim, linen, ceramic, wood, and glass beads, she draws from craft methodologies historically practiced by women in Southern Africa. Weaving, stitching, and beading operate as systems of transmission through which familial and social histories are carried forward. Natural dyes connect the work to plant knowledge, agricultural cycles, and trade routes that link the African continent to wider global histories. Textile becomes both structure and language, holding gestures of care, labour, and migration within its weave.

The dialogue between the two artists unfolds through process rather than image. Both think in layers and allow time to remain visible in the work. Both treat material as an active bearer of memory. In Giallo’s paintings, this memory settles into pigment and atmosphere. In Mbete’s textiles and sculptural forms, it is embedded in fibre and beadwork. Each artist approaches heritage as something lived and continually reactivated. 

Within a broader art historical perspective, 'What the Hands Know' participates in a renewed attention to natural materials and hand-based practices in contemporary art. At a moment shaped by ecological urgency and digital saturation, artists are returning to earth pigments, plant dyes, clay, and cloth as a way of reconsidering our relation to land and resource. This shift also reflects a reassessment of practices historically marginalized within dominant Western narratives, particularly those associated with the domestic sphere and with women’s labour. 

As two women artists working across the African continent and its diasporas, Giallo and Mbete contribute to ongoing conversations around ancestry, migration, and the politics of material. Their works do not illustrate heritage; they enact it through gesture. The exhibition situates painting and textile within a shared field of inquiry, where abstraction and craft meet as parallel forms of knowledge. Here, history is not fixed in representation. It is held in the persistence of the hand.