Let me hold your hand

The telephone plays an interesting part in contemporary culture. As a machine, it mediates not only between two people who are trying to communicate, but also between the past and the future. It's rapidly turning into an artifact of the information age, and of our increasingly pervasive technological environment.

It is therefore maybe not so strange that a lot of nostalgia already clings to the telephone. It has become a cultural object, a fetish, and a prop, which, from the film noir to the soap series, has asserted its place in our collective consciousness. In a sense, the telephone is a paradoxical instrument of desire, offering, as a public service, both intimacy and anonymity.

The installation “Let me hold your hand” consists of old telephones, salvaged from the obscurity of yard sales and second-hand shops. Each with its own peculiar character, derived from the ever changing trends of commodity design, seems to represent a different voice. If these objects could talk, what would they say?