Objects With Narratives: Where the Hand Thinks

In Brussels, at Objects With Narratives, the question is not what contemporary culture looks like, but how it is shaped. The gallery’s new exhibition unfolds as a quiet proposition. Meaning today may still come from slowness, from touch, from memory, rather than from speed or spectacle.

At its center stands Implemente 4, a solo presentation by Conrad Hicks. His works do not seek attention. They hold space. Steel and copper meet not as materials, but as states of being. Structure encounters softness. Force encounters yield. Hicks’ sculptures feel less like objects than condensed moments, as if metal briefly recalls its former lives as earth, fire, tool, and myth. In a culture increasingly detached from labor, his practice insists on the intelligence of the hand, on making as a form of thinking.

Running alongside, Digging Traces expands the perspective from the singular to the collective. This South African group exhibition proposes territory as a shared language. Not geography as image, but ground as lived experience. Soil, mineral, climate, and lineage quietly shape the works on view. What connects these artists is not style or history, but an embodied relationship to place. Their objects resist easy circulation and replication. They remain anchored, carrying the weight of where they come from.

Together, the exhibitions form a subtle portrait of contemporary desire. At a moment defined by frictionless interfaces and accelerated living, these works reintroduce resistance. They remind us that creation leaves traces on materials, on bodies, and on culture itself. There is something quietly radical in this insistence, yet it never becomes declarative.

What emerges is a vision of culture that is neither nostalgic nor speculative. It is grounded and present. It suggests that the future of art, design, and perhaps even how we live may depend less on constant innovation than on renewed attention. Attention to process. Attention to place. Attention to the simple fact that what we make also makes us.

At Objects With Narratives, contemporary culture is not announced. It is forged through patience, marked by touch, and left intentionally open, like anything still alive.

Objects With Narratives
Place du Grand Sablon 40, Brussels
On view from January 15, 2026
objectswithnarratives.com