A Taken Hand
Speculative Installation

2024

A Taken Hand is a speculative divination device built from found objects, inspired by the ancient practice of molybdomancy—where molten metal is poured into water and its forms are interpreted as signs of insight. Rooted in traditions from Mesopotamia, the ritual was often performed by gifted women to ward off the evil eye a.k.a. misfortune.

The project’s title recalls the gesture through which healing knowledge is passed from master to novice: giving the hand—an embodied gesture of trust, kinship, and transmission. Reimagining this act, A Taken Hand invites kinship between humans, machines, and materials. It resists capitalist notions of efficiency and utility, proposing technology as a relational, spiritual medium.

By merging ritual, craft, and speculation, the device becomes a productive unity where human intention and material agency meet, yet its production resists the logic of profit. Inspired by Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, the work asks: What new relational forms can emerge when a machine becomes a partner in care and intuition, rather than remaining as an object in a world viewed through the animate/inanimate dualism?

This is a collaborative project of Ceren Sözer & Adi Friedman.

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