Teach Me How To Hold

In photographs by Genesis Báez, Farah Al Qasimi, and Pia Guilmoth, the act of holding quietly reveals the forces that bind us to one another. 

Across portraits, domestic scenes, and surreal compositions, holding emerges as more than simply a gesture. It connects bodies and shapes relationships. These images ask us to slow down and notice the ordinary choreography of touch: the ways we care for one another, work alongside one another, negotiate intimacy, and navigate the structures that shape our lives.

Many of us notice hands right away. The way they move—the way we use them—often reveals intention before language does. They can communicate affection and tenderness or authority and containment. Hands carry traces of memory and history, revealing relationships that might otherwise remain unseen.

Using different visual styles, Báez, Al Qasimi, and Guilmoth explore holding as a way of thinking. While the hand remains a recurring visual anchor, the exhibition as a whole extends beyond the body itself. Holding becomes a broader condition: a way of describing how people and objects are bound together. Rather than offering fixed meanings, these photographs invite viewers to consider who is holding, what is being held, and under what conditions.

The title of the exhibition comes from a line in the poem “A Little Closer to the Edge,” by Ocean Vuong. The artworks suggest that holding is never a neutral act. It can nurture, protect, restrain, or claim. Here, it emerges as an ongoing practice of responsibility, asking how we remain connected to one another while recognizing the weight that every gesture carries.

For Báez, holding becomes a form of continuity. Her photographs repeatedly return to hair, touch, and familial relationships. We see braiding and caring for hair as both a cultural practice and a physical act of gathering and care among family members. Strands are separated, tensioned, and woven. Holding becomes a gesture of prolonged attention through which identity and inheritance are carried forward. 

Al Qasimi approaches holding through the dynamics of display and possession. Her photographs bring together domestic interiors, animals, ornamental surfaces, and consumer objects. These carefully staged encounters blur observation with performance. Al Qasimi explores the many ways people assert relationships to the world around them; holding shifts from an intimate gesture to a cultural and psychological one, becoming entangled with desire, ownership, and systems of value. In doing so, Al Qasimi complicates any assumption that holding is inherently benevolent, revealing its capacity to define and exert power.

Guilmoth expands holding beyond human relationships altogether. Her nocturnal photographs depict hands and fragile ecological systems where things are continually caught, gathered, protected, or released. Holding emerges as an environmental condition rather than solely a social one. Her images foreground vulnerability, asking how life persists through networks of attachment that are often delicate, temporary, and unseen. Guilmoth offers the exhibition’s broadest understanding of holding, not simply as care or possession, but as interdependence and survival.

— Davida Carta, curator

Artwork Images

Thank You

Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Patrick and Marcelle Leahy Fund for Photography.