“Please make a typical hand movement.” This request was a fixed part of the TV-show Heiteres Beruferaten. The hands that Uli Aigner has drawn indicate industriousness and everyday activities. At the same time, as is often the case with Uli Aigner, the work concerns references to her own childhood in a Lower Austrian single family home.

In the video Anni and Sepp (1997),  Aigner observes the daily “hand-ling” undertaken by her parents – from banal movements such as turning on a tap or wallpapering a room, through to the unconscious gestures of body language. The drawings, made parallel to the video, form a kind of catalogue of “normal” activities, too. In connection with the composition of he hand studies, the artist talks of “constructing, intervening and arranging”. Thus something schematic and anthropologically constant should be made clear in the individual observations. By choosing to use the medium of drawing, Aigner, up until then known mostly for her room installations and performances, consciously selected a (for her) unusual form of representation. With drawing, the artist was not able to rely on any experience; the work on the large-format sheets of paper was therefore a type of “self experiment”, as well.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)