The Bridge Gallery presents “What the Hands Know,” a duo exhibition bringing together for the first time the works of German-Guinean artist Ava Binta Giallo and South African artist Bulumko Mbete. On view from March 12 to April 18, 2026, the exhibition explores how gesture, material, and tactile engagement become vessels for memory, heritage, and lived experience.
The exhibition marks Giallo’s first presentation with The Bridge Gallery and Mbete’s second collaboration with the gallery. It features a selection of new works by both artists: textile and sculptural pieces by Mbete, and tempera paintings on canvas produced by Giallo between 2023 and 2025. Though working in different mediums, the artists share a common inquiry—how the hand acts as a carrier of knowledge and memory across time and generations.
Embodied Knowledge and Material Memory
The title What the Hands Know points to a form of knowledge that exists prior to language. Rather than relying on representation or narrative imagery, the exhibition focuses on gesture and process, proposing that memory and experience can be transmitted through repeated physical engagement with materials. In both artists’ practices, the hand becomes a repository of lived histories, embedding gestures of labor, care, and repetition into surfaces and fibers.
Through the slow accumulation of pigment, textile threads, and natural materials, the works reveal how time and touch become visible in artistic processes. Each piece reflects the persistence of manual practice—where the act of making becomes a way of remembering, preserving, and reactivating cultural knowledge.
Ava Binta Giallo: Atmospheres of Color and Time
Ava Binta Giallo’s recent tempera paintings extend her long-standing exploration of abstraction, atmosphere, and material sensitivity. Working in delicate, patient layers, she builds subtle fields of color that hover between opacity and translucence. The resulting surfaces evoke a sense of suspended light, where pigment seems to settle quietly within the canvas.
Rather than outlining forms directly, Giallo allows shapes and tonal variations to emerge gradually through layered applications of paint. This slow process creates compositions that exist at the edge of visibility—spaces where color, light, and depth unfold over time.
Her approach reconsiders the legacy of abstract painting by shifting its focus toward intimacy and permeability. The canvas becomes a temporal surface, where each layer of pigment carries a trace of the artist’s gesture and the duration of its making.
Bulumko Mbete: Textile as Living Archive
In contrast yet in dialogue with Giallo’s painted atmospheres, Bulumko Mbete’s works explore textile as an archive of memory and cultural transmission. Her new pieces incorporate materials such as indigo dye, bull denim, linen, ceramic, wood, and glass beads, drawing on craft traditions historically practiced by women across Southern Africa.
Techniques such as weaving, stitching, and beading operate as systems through which histories are passed down across generations. In Mbete’s work, these processes function not merely as aesthetic choices but as forms of storytelling and knowledge preservation.
Natural dyes used in her textiles connect the work to plant knowledge, agricultural cycles, and historical trade routes, revealing how African craft traditions intersect with broader global histories. Through these materials, Mbete creates objects that embody gestures of care, labor, migration, and familial connection.
Her textile structures therefore become living archives, holding traces of domestic practices, rituals, and collective memory within their woven forms.
Dialogue Between Painting and Textile
Although Giallo and Mbete work in different mediums, their practices converge through shared methods of layering, repetition, and tactile engagement. The dialogue between the artists unfolds through process rather than imagery, emphasizing how materials themselves carry historical and emotional resonance.
In Giallo’s work, memory settles into pigment, color, and atmosphere, while in Mbete’s textiles it becomes embedded within fiber, stitch, and beadwork. Both artists approach heritage not as a static concept, but as something continuously enacted and reactivated through making.
The exhibition positions painting and textile as parallel forms of knowledge, challenging traditional hierarchies that historically separated fine art from craft. Instead, it proposes a shared field where abstraction and hand-based practices intersect.
Contemporary Context: Materials, Ecology, and Reassessment of Craft
What the Hands Know also engages with a broader movement within contemporary art that is re-centering natural materials and manual processes. At a time shaped by digital saturation and ecological concerns, many artists are returning to earth pigments, plant dyes, clay, and cloth as ways of reconsidering humanity’s relationship to land, resources, and tradition.
This renewed interest in hand-based practices also reflects a critical reassessment of historically marginalized artistic traditions, particularly those associated with domestic labor and women’s craft. By foregrounding textile, weaving, and natural dyeing, the exhibition highlights forms of knowledge that have long existed outside dominant Western art narratives.
Artists and Diasporic Perspectives
As two women artists working across the African continent and its diasporas, Giallo and Mbete contribute to ongoing conversations surrounding ancestry, migration, identity, and material politics.
Rather than illustrating heritage directly, their works activate it through gesture and process. The exhibition suggests that history is not only recorded in archives or images, but also embedded in the movements of the hand and the transformation of materials.
Here, memory is not represented—it is physically enacted through artistic practice.
The Artists
Ava Binta Giallo
Born in 1995, Ava Binta Giallo is a German-Guinean interdisciplinary artist working primarily in abstract painting and installation. She lives and works between Vienna, Austria, and Mindelo, Cabo Verde.
Giallo studied TransArts (BA and MA) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, and Abstract Painting and Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is also a founding member of the collective fuvu fürunsvonuns.
Her work has been exhibited widely across Europe and Africa, including presentations at Forum Frohner (Krems), DAS WEISSE HAUS (Vienna), Basis Frankfurt, Kunstverein Langenhagen, PACT Zollverein (Essen), Parallel Vienna, Exhibit Gallery (Vienna), Heiligenkreuzerhof University Gallery, the Gabès Ethnographic Museum in Tunisia, and the Centro Cultural do Mindelo in Cabo Verde.
Giallo has participated in artist residencies at the Foundation for Contemporary Art Ghana in Accra, La Boîte Tunis in Gabès, and Atelier Mar in Mindelo.
Bulumko Mbete
Bulumko Mbete is a South African artist and writer whose practice explores materiality, memory, and transmission through craft-based methodologies. She works between Johannesburg and the United States.
Her work engages with textiles, beadwork, weaving, and natural dyeing, drawing inspiration from domestic and artisanal practices historically carried by women in Southern Africa. Through these processes, Mbete creates frameworks for communicating generational traditions and gestures of love.
Her research also extends into archival storytelling. Using photographs, textiles, and garments, she explores family histories and geographies in relation to migration, labor, farming, and South African social history.
Mbete completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and is currently an MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2023 she received the Cassirer Welz Award and the ABSA L’Atelier Gerard Sekoto Award.
Recent solo exhibitions include Like the sky, I’ve been too quiet at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg (2023) and I’ve known rivers at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg (2023). Selected group exhibitions include autopseis at blank projects (Cape Town, 2025), Between Words and Worlds at The Bridge Gallery (Paris, 2024), and Gather II at SMAC Gallery (Cape Town, 2024).
About The Bridge Gallery
Founded in early 2023 by Alexandre Fabry and Vianney Salzac, The Bridge Gallery is a Paris-based contemporary art gallery dedicated to supporting emerging and ultra-emerging artists, with a particular focus on artists from Africa and its diasporas.
Since its inception, the gallery has played an important role in introducing several international artists to audiences in France, including Sarfo Emmanuel Annor, JC Bright, Bulumko Mbete, and Dale Lawrence.
Between 2023 and 2024, the gallery operated in a nomadic format, presenting exhibitions across different contexts in order to build connections with communities and broaden the visibility of its artists. In Fall 2024, The Bridge Gallery established a permanent space in the heart of Paris, strengthening its presence within the city’s contemporary art landscape.
Exhibition Details
Press Preview: March 11, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Opening Reception: March 12, 2026 | 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: March 12 – April 18, 2026
Venue:
The Bridge Gallery
19 rue Louise-Emilie de la Tour d’Auvergne
75009 Paris, France
Contact:
Email: contact@thebridgegallery.xyz
