Exhibition “our hands meet, please, hold on”

The exhibition brings together the artists’ distinct yet dialogic practices – Tilks’s monumental spatial structures and Edson’s images created through analogue photography – exploring the liminal states of closeness, distance, and touch.

In collaboration, Jamieson Edson and Virgilijs Tilks move through the space between closeness and distance, beginning with the charged possibility of connection and the hesitation that often accompanies it. The desire to reach toward another person is met by an equally strong instinct to preserve one’s own boundaries.

The work emerges from this tension, exploring how intimacy can be both an act of approach and a form of resistance. Coming from different visual and cultural backgrounds, artists bring distinct sensibilities into dialogue. One practice leans toward structure, weight, and architectural form; the other toward photography, fleeting gestures, and emotional immediacy. Rather than dissolving these differences, artists allow them to remain visible, shaping the work through exchange, friction, and mutual transformation.

Throughout the installation, images of hands, touch, and suspended gestures appear as recurring traces of contact – moments that feel both intimate and uncertain, as if they are about to happen or have already slipped away. Materials behave in similar ways. Modular structures can assemble into larger environments or separate into individual forms. Laser-engraved textiles, layered plywood panels, exposed bolts, and fragmented surfaces function both as connectors and as barriers, holding together what also threatens to come apart.