Your Hail Photos collects images of hands holding hailstones that have been shared on the Internet. Most have been submitted to various US local news columns also titled Your Hail Photos. The images capture a universal, spontaneous, ingenuous reverence for nature and the compulsion to share that sense of awe. They instantly orient us about human scale; we are big enough to hold a hailstone in the palm of our hand but we are minuscule and powerless in the face of the storm. The pictures seem to ask how something so small can wreak such havoc.

The new series by Dina Kelberman describes not only the object on display but the person displaying it. The hail held a particular way, the rulers that help us understand the scale, the backgrounds we can see, dirty hands, clean hands. Were these photos composed with public presentation in mind or taken casually, and then submitted afterwards? The hailstones are simultaneously mysterious and innocuous. They are temporary. They are disappearing as this photo is taken.

Displayed in the windows of the municipal building in Getxo where the Social Services are located, the images reach a new international audience. Their authors provide social service on a global scale. Without knowing the time and place they were found, who took them or why, the message is still clear: Look what fell out of the sky!

Dina Kelberman was born in 1979 in Annapolis, USA, and is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Purchase College in New York. Kelberman has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally and has created web-based collection works for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute, New York. Her work has been presented in numerous international biennials and has been written about in The New York Times, Art21, NPR, Known and Strange Things (collection of essays published by Random House) and most recently The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (a compendium published by Routledge) and in Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (published by Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston). In 2018 she was invited by poet Kenneth Goldsmith to speak at the UbuWeb conference in Athens and by Fotomuseum Winterthur to the P3 Post-Photography Prototyping Prize Biennial in London. In 2019 she completed her first feature-length recontextualization film, The Goal is to Live. She is currently ranked 5th in the world for Most Lines in Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In 2020 she was the recipient of Dazibao Instagram Residency.

Dina Kelberman (USA, 1979)
Your Hail Photos

2021 Edition
Outdoor installation
Venue: Social Services Building