As The Hands of Gods makes its European debut at Art Basel, the artist reflects on food as archive, the politics of gesture, and building a table that doesn’t ask for permission.
Promotional still for The Hands of Gods — a short film and ritual installation exploring surveillance, refusal, and the remnants of empire. Credit: Jonah Batambuze, 2025
At this year’s Art Basel, where spectacle often eclipses slowness, Jonah Batambuze’s The Hands of Gods offers something else entirely: a ritual. Presented at Atelier Mondial as part of the group show ‘Wild at Art’, the short film and sculptural installation explores how colonial codes continue to shape everyday gestures—how we eat, bless, reach, and remember. Rooted in the artist’s Black Ugandan–South Indian household, the work centres the left hand as a site of both taboo and resistance. Drawing from a personal history shaped by kitchens, contradictions, and diasporic knowledge, Batambuze frames food as both an archive and altar—a place where memory is preserved through repetition, not record. In this conversation, he reflects on building a practice outside institutional systems, using the senses to tell stories that remain unspeakable. The Hands of Gods invites audiences to sit with what lingers: scent, silence, discipline, and the quiet power of refusal.
Stephan Rheeder: The Hands of Gods makes its European debut at Art Basel this June—an environment often shaped by commerce and spectacle. What does it mean to situate a ritual-based, anti-spectacle work like this within that space?
Jonah Batambuze: Presenting The Hands of Gods at Art Basel is both a provocation and a responsibility. In a space driven by spectacle and speed, this offering moves at a deliberate pace. It lingers. It smells like your grandmother’s best-kept dish. It tastes like something remembered and connected to special occasions. It moves like an ancestor behind you, silent but watching. Someone wipes their hands. Someone else doesn’t finish their plate. The cardamom hangs in the air longer than the conversation. The Hands of Gods interrupts. The table is a structure. Laid with stainless steel plates, wax cloth, maybe a sticky cup no one replaces. In a place obsessed with polish, this offering insists on residue.
In Switzerland, a place that curates its colonial neutrality, this installation doesn’t just appear. It stains. It remembers out loud. Not for market, not for headlines—for memory, for grief, for those who never got to finish their meal.
You’ve said this work “doesn’t beg for recognition—it designs its own table.” Can you speak more about what it means to create on your terms, especially when dealing with histories of marginalisation?
Creating on my own terms means not waiting for permission or legitimacy. I didn’t come through the MFA system. I came through kitchens, conversations, and contradictions. My practice is rooted in the textures of what survives: wax cloth, banana leaves, and WhatsApp threads laced with prayer and protest.
The Hands of Gods doesn’t ask for a seat at the table. It arrives already set, with the chapati folded by memory, the fried plantain left too long in the oil, the bruised knuckles and the left hand reaching anyway. It doesn’t tap dance for the dominant gaze. It builds on knowledge already possessed.
To create from histories of marginalisation is to carry both the wound and the spice. You inherit silence—but also abundance. Some days, it’s clarity. On other days, it’s about remembering what was passed down and what had to be invented. You work with the side-eye, the story tucked under the tongue, the silence that still speaks.
This offering is anchored in refusal, not as rebellion, but as ritual. It speaks in a mother tongue: spiced, fractured, familiar. Like a dream, you wake up chewing on. The pot’s been on low heat before you arrived.
A participatory performance of The Hands of Gods in progress — blending food, film, and ritual inside a red-lit space. Credit: Jonah Batambuze, 2024
The installation invites viewers to experience the tension of the “wrong” hand—left-handedness as both taboo and a testament. What drew you to the left hand as a site of rupture and resistance?
We’re told 90% of the world is right-handed—as if that makes everyone who isn’t wrong. This notion became personal when my children put it to the test. What was the norm in my Black, Ugandan, South Indian household – two left-handed children – presented a problem to the world.
Initially, it was minor corrections. Curious glances. Then it became a pattern. I began filming my kids doing everyday things: eating, playing the violin, and reaching instinctively. These weren’t just habits. They were refusals.
A Black-Zimbabwean friend told me his father had the left-handedness beaten out of him. That cracked something open. This wasn’t anecdotal—it was systemic. The left hand became a target across caste, colonial, and religious systems. But it also holds intuition. Spirit. Refusal. A child breaks bread. Someone flinches. The camera keeps rolling.
The Hands of Gods doesn’t rehabilitate the left hand. It reclaims what we were taught to fear, gestures marked as sinful, and offers them back to us as our authorship.
There’s something powerful about how your work centres the kitchen, the table, and the act of eating. Why do you return to food as an archive—and what stories does it allow you to tell that other media do not?
I return to food because I never forget. Recipes survive where records disappear. The kitchen becomes an archive—not of artefacts but of actions. My mother didn’t need a journal. She handed me a plate. Hot. Familiar. The story was already on it. Eating by hand reveals what a culture holds sacred. Who gets served first. What we bless. What we waste. These gestures speak louder than any document. Sometimes, the story is about migration. Chapati made its way from Punjab to Kampala. The Kati roll became the Ugandan rolex—colonial residue refolded into a ritual. Food doesn’t just nourish. It holds grief. Joy. Migration. Celebration. It speaks in tongues: pilau rice, coconut oil, G-nut sauce, fried plantain. The table doesn’t erase the hierarchy. Sometimes, it enforces it. Some names never made it to the plate. But we taste them still. The Hands of Gods carries that logic forward—across installation, performance, and film. Food as memory. Ritual as witness.
Jonah Batambuze addresses an audience following a screening. The space becomes a second skin — part sermon, part séance, part standstill.
This piece carries the intimacy of memory and the weight of surveillance. How do you choreograph presence in the installation—when sometimes there is silence and, other times, a full communal meal?
Presence isn’t static in The Hands of Gods. It breathes. Sometimes, it hums: the clink of metal on metal, the rustle of banana leaves, a phone recording quietly in the corner. Other times, it bursts—laughter spills, hands reach across the table, and someone asks why the rice is yellow.
The offering is modular, spanning the spectrum from solitude to communion. I’m interested in how we hold both and how silence can feel like prayer or punishment. How joy can be loud but still carry grief.
Surveillance lives here, too, but not always from the outside. Sometimes it’s internal. What happens when a right-handed guest eats with their left? Or when someone is scolded gently for reaching with the wrong hand? Discipline disguised as decorum. This isn’t passive viewing. It’s a ritual of interruption. Not installation as spectacle, but as slow reckoning.
Your work often crosses boundaries—between art and life, ritual and politics, diaspora and belonging. Where do you see ‘The Hands of Gods’ sitting about your broader work with BlindianProject?
I don’t see it as crossing boundaries. Art and life. Ritual and politics. Diaspora and belonging. These were never separate. They’re the daily choreography of Black x Brown’s existence. The Hands of Gods isn’t a shift from BlindianProject—it’s its most intimate form of authorship—spice-stained fingers. Stainless steel plates. A left hand, once punished, is now feeding memory. I’m not interested in explaining culture. I’m creating a living archive—through gesture, food, and refusal. The Hands of Gods is the first in a series of experiential installations and performances that reimagine how ritual operates. Over the next year, I will be developing and exhibiting new offerings across Europe, South Asia, Africa, and the U.S.—bringing these ideas to museums, street corners, and kitchen tables. These are spaces for memory, rupture, reorientation and healing.
For more information, please visit Jonah Batambuze and the BlindianProject.
