It is through the artist’s hand that fragments are gathered, that relationships are formed, that memory is given provisional shape.
There is something deliberately unresolved in Rita Keegan’s Time, Place, Memory (2021). Like the artist, it’s a work that refuses the comfort of cohesion. It does not present memory as a stable image but as a restless condition – assembled, disassembled, and reassembled again. Woven, if you will.
Rita Keegan is a New York–born artist and archivist whose practice spans collage, textiles, and digital media, rooted in a lifelong instinct for making and collecting. Drawing on her extensive family archive and experiences of migration, she explores identity as something fluid, actively negotiated and reclaimed.
What Rita Keegan offers is not a document, but a proposition. Memory as an activity, a form of labor that unfolds across time. Keegan’s commitment to scissors, glue and photocopy foregrounds the hand as a site of authorship. The hand plays the motif as the uttermost presence of self, vulnerability and “proof of life”.
The work emerges from a practice invested in intergenerational creative kinship, where making is never singular but shared. It echoes the narrative of British Art Network’s Journey to There, Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain, a film centering Keegan that collages two years of collaboration, weaving archival materials with intimate dialogue. The archive is not inert, it is handled (literally and conceptually). Activated through touch, and through the insistence that history must be felt as much as it is seen.
This is where the presence of the hand becomes crucial. Not as a romantic gesture, but as evidence. The hand is a trophy. It signifies decisions made and unmade. It interrupts the fantasy of seamless reproduction. In an era that privileges the frictionless image, the hand reintroduces humanity – marking the work with the trace of a body that has encountered it.
Keegan’s surfaces do not conceal their construction. Instead, they emphasize it, allowing the viewer to register the intimacy of contact. These gestures operate as a counter-archive: one that resists standardization and asserts real human connection.
What is at stake is not simply preservation, but archiving as activism within the contemporary curatorial realm. The act of keeping, touching, arranging, and reworking demands that material becomes inseparable from the act of remembering.
To see the hand is to be reminded that experience is not abstract; it is lived, accumulated, and inscribed. What Time, Place, Memory ultimately offers is not clarity, but proximity. The viewer is brought close not to an image, but to an encounter: between material and maker, between past and present, between one hand and another.
