For Every Gesture Made in Private

Knock on wood. Cross the threshold with the right foot. Keep the coin you’ve always kept. We make these gestures quietly, often without believing in them, and almost always alone — small insurances against a day that refuses to promise anything. This thesis takes them seriously.

For Every Gesture Made In Private argues that superstition is not a relic of irrational thinking but a form of emotional infrastructure: the quiet architecture people build to steady themselves when reason stops offering reassurance. It reframes superstition as behaviour rather than belief — an adaptive response to uncertainty, not a failure of logic. The same instinct that moves a trader to wear a lucky tie moves a migrant to carry a handful of home across an ocean. Stripped of culture, the gesture is the same: a way of relocating fear onto something you can hold.

For Every Gesture Made in Private — thesis spread tracing a gesture from superstition to geography to origin

For Every Gesture Made in Private — archival research imagery from the superstition dictionary

For Every Gesture Made in Private Thesis spreads — gesture research and dictionary imagery · 2026

Stripped of culture, the gesture is the same: a way of relocating fear onto something you can hold.

The project organises this instinct around six emotional conditions — Uncertainty, Anxiety, Loss of Control, Displacement, Protection, and Hope — and follows them across three forms. A nine-chapter written thesis builds the argument. A Dictionary of Contemporary Superstitions, a pocket-sized artist’s book of thirty entries, collects the gestures themselves, each traced from superstition to geography to origin. And a three-part exhibition translates the inquiry into space.

For Every Gesture Made in Private — installation study for the three-part exhibition

II — Emotion Becomes Architecture

In the exhibition, emotion becomes architecture. WITHOUT seals the visitor inside a mirrored cylindrical room where a single holographic emerald ring hovers in the dark — control made visible by its absence. The Gesture answers the body: photographs and sound that surface only when someone draws near, the way a ritual surfaces only when it’s needed. The Archive of Unmarked Objects lines a room with niched objects beneath a crescent of projected light — a quiet museum of things people kept for reasons they could never quite name. Minimal, low-lit, deliberately restrained, each room treats absence and atmosphere as material.

For Every Gesture Made in Private — thesis spread with a kept object photographed on red, from the pandemic-ritual chapter

For Every Gesture Made in Private — thesis spread with low-lit installation photographs of the exhibition rooms

A Dictionary of Contemporary Superstitions Book spread · installation photographs · 2026

Around these sit a short film shot in India with an original score, and a browser-based 3D walkthrough of WITHOUT — the same idea reaching through moving image, sound, and code.

The dictionary ends on a line that holds for the whole project: It is not a complete record. It is a beginning.

In the exhibition, emotion becomes architecture.