ΠΡΟΑΙΡΕΣΙΣ COLLECTION
At the heart of this collection lies an ancient insight: that what we call free will is not simply the power to act, but the power to choose well. Long before the term itself took shape, Aristotle gave this capacity a name—προαίρεσις (proaíresis): a deliberate, reasoned choice, formed not in impulse, but in reflection. For Aristotle, it is this faculty that defines us ethically. We are not merely beings who act; we are beings who decide how to act, weighing possibilities, shaping intention, and in doing so, shaping ourselves.
This collection presents forty works that explore one of humanity’s most enduring questions: what does it mean to choose? At its center stands “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo, a composition defined not by contact, but by distance. Two hands reach toward one another: the divine hand fully extended, and the human hand—Adam’s—slightly withdrawn. In that infinitesimal gap resides something profound. It is not absence, but possibility. Not refusal, but the moment before choice.
This space between the hands becomes a visual analogue of προαίρεσις. It is the pause in which deliberation occurs—the threshold where desire, reason, and action converge. God’s gesture may symbolize an ever-present call, but Adam’s response is not automatic. His hand does not yet meet the divine; it hovers, suspended in the freedom to choose whether it will. In this sense, free will is not portrayed as boundless autonomy, but as something more demanding: a responsible openness, a readiness to decide.
The collection of works here extend that moment outward into the human world. Free will, as this exhibition proposes, is not merely the liberty to act, but the deeper and more exacting responsibility to discern—to transform impulse into intention, and intention into action. It is, in Aristotelian terms, the continuous exercise of προαίρεσις, where each decision reflects not only what we do, but who we are becoming.
Within this framework, the hand emerges as the central symbol. It is not just a physical form, but the visible instrument of choice. The hand executes what the mind has resolved; it is where thought becomes deed. Across these forty works, each gesture carries the weight of deliberation—each movement the trace of an inner decision made visible.
The exhibition’s guiding question—“How do you use your free will?”—thus echoes Aristotle’s deeper concern: not whether we are free, but how we choose to exercise that freedom. For it is through repeated acts of choosing that character is formed, and through character that a life takes shape.
This exhibition is an invitation to stand, like Adam, within that charged interval before action. To recognize in our own hands the quiet power of προαίρεσις — and to understand that in this space, as small and silent as it may seem, lies the origin of everything we make of ourselves—and of the world.
The Reaching Hand: God and the Possibility of Choice
Opposite Adam’s hand is the hand of God—fully extended, reaching toward humanity. Whether one believes in God as a divine presence, understands the gesture as a symbol of faith, or sees it simply as an image of something greater than ourselves, the reaching hand represents a constant invitation. It is always there, extended toward us, yet it does not force itself upon us. The distance between the two hands therefore becomes essential: God may reach, but humanity must choose whether and how to respond.
The divine hand can be understood as a presence that accompanies human existence across time—a source of possibility, guidance, meaning, or conscience that remains available whether or not it is recognized. It does not eliminate human freedom; rather, its very restraint preserves it. The hand reaches, but does not grasp. It offers, but does not compel. In that space between offering and response lies the freedom that defines the human condition.
Seen in this way, the divine is not necessarily represented as an answer, but as an ever-present possibility. For the believer, it may be God; for another, faith, conscience, morality, love, truth, or the sense of something beyond the individual self. What matters is that something reaches toward us, while the final movement remains our own. The collection inhabits precisely this space—the space between what is offered and what we choose to make of it.
The reaching hand therefore completes the central tension of the exhibition. Adam represents humanity’s freedom to choose; God represents the presence that reaches toward that freedom. One hand extends, the other hesitates. Between them is neither certainty nor absence, but possibility—the quiet interval in which every human being must decide how to respond.
Adam: The Human Condition and the Freedom to Choose
At the centre of this collection stands Adam—not simply as the first man, but as a symbol of humanity itself. In Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, the space between the divine and human hands captures the instant in which human existence becomes inseparable from the possibility of choice. Adam’s hand does not yet meet the hand extended toward him; it remains suspended in an interval of possibility, suggesting that to be human is not merely to exist or to act, but to possess the capacity to determine how one will respond. In this sense, free will is not something added to human existence—it is built into it.
The collection therefore approaches free will not as limitless freedom, but as the capacity and responsibility to choose between possibilities. This understanding resonates with the ancient Greek philosophical pursuit of μέτρον and balance—the recognition that human flourishing depends upon the measured relationship between opposing forces. Strength and restraint, desire and reason, individuality and responsibility, creation and destruction are not separate conditions but tensions within which human life unfolds. The works gathered here hold these possibilities together, allowing the viewer to encounter both the constructive and destructive potential contained within human choice.
Adam thus becomes a mirror for every human being. His suspended hand represents the moment before action, when possibility has not yet become consequence and intention has not yet become deed. The forty works that follow extend this moment across the human experience, asking not simply whether we are free, but what we choose to do with the freedom inherent in our existence. What we create, what we give, what we preserve—and what we destroy—ultimately becomes the measure of the lives we make and the world we leave behind.
A Collection of 40 Works
“I am what I do with my hands”
Louise Bourgeois
