The gesture of holding one’s hands together recurs throughout religious and ceremonial iconography, typically associated with desire, supplication, or forms of ritualized intention. Across different traditions, the gesture appears in varied configurations—open palms, pressed hands, rubbing motions, or fingertips lightly touching during a bow. When removed from its cultural and devotional frameworks, this seemingly universal pose becomes an autonomous physical structure. The work asks what impressions, effects, or residues of meaning remain when the gesture is detached from the narratives that usually authorize it.

The hand form used here draws from the characteristic gesture adopted by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her sixteen years in office. In this context, the pose departs from spiritual connotations and instead operates as a political emblem: a controlled, stable configuration of the body that accumulated symbolic force through repetition and public visibility. By re-situating this gesture within an isolated, non-representational setting, the work examines how a single bodily configuration can oscillate between domains—ritual, politics, habit, and abstraction—and how meaning is produced or dissolved through repetition, detachment, and formal persistence.