Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann

There is something unforgettably eerie in the simple image of one person’s hand inspecting, stroking, squeezing, and scratching that of another person—only to reverse roles after a while. The encounters staged in Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann’s video are between perpetrators and survivors, each announced only by an intertitle naming the deed: robbery, harassment, attempted murder, or adultery, for instance.

The work is a simple exercise in overcoming what has been polemically dubbed the “Oppression Olympics,” that contemporary deadlock in which both the Left and the Right insist on perpetual stigma and trump each other’s claim to victimhood. The latest work in the duo’s Army of Love series, I Give You My Hand plays out as a queasy domestic ritual, a near-taboo gesture toward the kind of mutual recognition that contemporary politics has all but outlawed.

Alexa Karolinski (1984, Berlin, Germany) is a writer and director who works across documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. Her work moves between intimate portraiture and historical excavation, tracing the ways trauma, memory, and silenced histories live on in the body and in form. Together with Ingo Niermann, she codirected several films in the umbrella project The Army of Love, which explores shared intimacy and love. Karolinski cocreated and cowrote the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. She lives in Berlin.

Ingo Niermann (1969, Bielefeld, Germany) is a writer known for his speculative novels and nonfiction as well as his forays into contemporary art. His meticulous and playful utopias—such as those of an Army of Love or a Monadic Age—defy established certainties across all ideological camps. Niermann lives in Basel.