Bianca Hlywa, Morag Keil, Margherita Raso, The Invisible Hand at Gianni Manhattan, Vienna

When we speak of invisible hands, the mind leaps toward economics and its arcane machinery. But pause for a moment, and something subtler, more unsettling, begins to surface. An invisible hand can also tilt your chin, forcing you to look where you’d rather not. It can suggest what is worthy of attention, and what should quietly vanish. It can feed and poison in the same gesture. In this exhibition, the smirking metaphor once conjured by Adam Smith sheds its idealist glow and reveals itself as a tool for colonizing both perception and matter.
To enter The Invisible Hand is not merely to cross the threshold of a gallery, it is to sink into an unresolved question, who really guides the hand that creates, that films, that observes, that curates, or that exhibits?

Inside Gianni Manhattan in Vienna, curated with surgical precision by Bianca Stoppani, the exhibition unfolds like a body in slow transformation. The lighting is measured to the millimeter, almost clinical, yet the works pulse with organic and cultural life. The path through the show is not didactic or linear, but centrifugal. Each piece exposes itself and then retreats, suggesting affinities that are tactile rather than narrative. One has the impression of moving through a series of shared flashbacks, a glitchy video, a fabric that smells faintly of animal past, a substance that ferments and reeks.
The space is not crowded, which makes the flow more intimate, more fragile. You can linger in front of a detail, step away, and leave with the feeling that it whispered something you don’t yet fully understand.

Morag Keil’s Passive Aggressive (2016) orchestrates a visual and sonic suite that blends mechanical voyeurism with the pornography of consumption. Motorcycles, filmed up close with a handheld camera, become sexualized and identity-charged fetishes, symbols of desire that never quite belong to the individual. Six video channels, advertising glitches, and a deliberately exposed tech apparatus all work to sabotage the possibility of aesthetic pleasure, as if to remind us that every seductive image is a minefield.

Bianca Hlywa ventures into a more visceral, almost alchemical terrain. The Image of the Tide (2017) presents a fragment of SCOBY, half-alive, half-dead, sealed inside a translucent bag, spinning in the updraft of a fan. The scene is tragic yet magnetic, an organism rendered visible only at the cost of its own life. The acrid smell, the moist texture, the daily labor required to keep it “presentable” without letting it fully die, all turn the work into a silent outcry against the economies of exposure and extraction.

Finally, Margherita Raso leads us into a different kind of staging. Studio (2024) is a fake, and an epiphany. A 1:1 replica of the window from her former studio in Basel becomes a membrane suspended between intimacy and representation. Two 1950s shoulder pads, processed animal by-products, disrupt the presumed transparency of the absent glass. Like markers or relics, they gesture toward absent yet summoned bodies. Raso works on the skin of things, at the threshold between what is seen and what is projected. There is no nostalgia here, but a constant tension between interiority and surface.