There is a peculiar kind of intelligence that lives in the hands of an artist, not the same as the intelligence of the mind - rather an intelligence that comes from experience and repetition and intuition. That intelligence, derived from lived experience, from being in the world, is the motivation behind the exhibition The Hand Knows What the Mind Forgets.

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When artist/musician Sergei Kurek notices a spring or a bolt or length of metal hose, he isn’t “deciding“ what to make. He’s doing something more like listening: to the weight, to the way it sits in the palm and, on a deeper level, to what the object wants to become. When a piece of his found-object jewelry is finished and he shows it to someone, he says “if I see them smile, I know it’s done.” There’s something beautiful and tender and unanswerable in that statement. The work exists to produce a response in the body of the person who encounters it. And somehow, in that simplicity of idea an entire world, an entire way of being is shared between the artist and the person who encounters the work.

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Several years ago, Sergei built a boat from styrofoam and leftover scraps of wood and metal, materials that have no business becoming a boat. He loaded it into the Landwehr Canal and then simply pushed-off into the water. What strikes me about that simple act is that he isn’t performing anything. Just a man on the water in a boat he made himself. What I keep returning to is that image of the boat doing exactly what it was built to do on a surface that pushes it along - boat, man and water moving together. An artistic action that is both gentle and meaningful, for no other reason than it exists rather than declares.

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Along with the boat and the jewelry made from scraps of metal, the exhibition also includes a drum machine or rather what Sergei calls “a funk machine”. The funk machine was built from the motor of a salvaged electric scooter. The motor drives a pole, and at the end of the pole is a ceramic hand. The hand and the motion and the sound of the machine make a rhythm nobody composed. The machine found it on its own. In a way the funk machine describes everything else in the exhibition: The hand knows. The mind forgets. Whatever understanding comes from Sergei’s 40 years of picking things up and turning them over and recognizing what a piece of metal or wood or hardware wants to become isn’t stored anywhere that the mind can retrieve. It comes through the work the same way the rhythm comes from the motor.

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About the Artist

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Berlin-based musician, artist, and tinkerer Sergei Kurek grew up in Gomel, a city of about half a million people near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, roughly 2 hours from Kyiv. When Sergei was six years old the region around Gomel was evacuated due to the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Though the city still exists, the entire region around Gomel remains empty to this day. Though the buildings still stand, people who lived there left and never came back.