Opens March 1, 2026
Alina Tenser (55), Drag Swipe Click Pinch at HARDWARE
Still from Alina Tenser: Drag Swipe Pinch Click, 2021, 2 minute 15 second video on loop.
About
Alina Tenser’s Drag Swipe Click Pinch references the touch-screen gestures famously patented by Apple and performed by human hands on our digital devices. Across her work, Tenser is interested in the physical characteristics that allow our bodies connection with an object. Here, playfully calling our attention to each gesture’s form, the artist animates metal pieces lured by magnet in a tray filled with water. As they drag, swipe, click, and pinch their way across the screen in this video, we are left to contemplate a familiar choreography endlessly performed by our own fingertips.
Alina Tenser: Drag Swipe Pinch Click at HARDWARE is curated by Lighthouse Works Curator-at-Large Laurel Ptak, with the support of Community Coordinator, Claudia DeSimone; Fellowship Coordinator, Eliza Schmidt.
HARDWARE is a year-round exhibition space for film and video by contemporary artists located in the loose screw section of Island Hardware on Fishers Island. Every two months, a new moving-image work by a former Lighthouse Works Fellow appears, inviting unexpected encounters with contemporary art where the everyday rhythms, textures, and temporalities of a hardware shop frame the work. Conceived by master carpenter Dave Beckwith and curator Laurel Ptak, HARDWARE grew out of an earlier collaboration as part of the exhibition Sara Magenheimer: Ill-Gotten Gains.
Located inside Island Hardware at 741 The Gloaming on Fishers Island, HARDWARE is programmed by Lighthouse Works and open to the public during business hours, from Monday–Friday 8am–4pm and Sunday 8am–noon, or by appointment. For further information about the exhibition contact Nate Malinowski at [email protected] or (631) 788-7713.
Artist(s)
Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian-born artist and educator who was a Lighthouse Works Fellow in 2023. Working across sculpture, video, and performance, her practice explores the dialogue between play, constraint, and language, often through forms that invite tactile or imagined interaction. Tenser is especially interested in affordances—features like handles, zippers, or wheels that suggest use and shape behavior—as a way of thinking about how we navigate the limitations and openings in our lives. Born in Ukraine and raised in the U.S. from the age of nine, she mines the entanglements of her experience as an immigrant and parent to inform her attention to resourcefulness, transformation, displacement, and the embodied experience.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at KinoSaito Art Center (Verplanck, NY), HESSE FLATOW (New York, NY), SE Cooper Contemporary (Portland, OR), 17Essex Gallery (New York, NY), Konstepidemin (Gothenburg, SE), Soloway Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and AIR (New York, NY). Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Cultured, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Third Rail.
In 2024 her work was included in Great Women Sculptors, a Phaidon Press publication honoring 300 women sculptors from the Renaissance to today. In 2022 she completed In Parentheses, a public installation at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Chemo Infusion Center in Brooklyn. She has participated in residencies at Triangle Arts (Brooklyn, NY), Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY), the Queens Museum Studio Program (Queens, NY), and Recess (Brooklyn, NY). Tenser is an Assistant Professor of Art at Lehigh University, where she teaches sculpture.
