In Mach dich selbst (Do It Yourself), Michael Müller turns to the hand as a site of both intimacy and estrangement. Across thirty minutes of video, the hand is staged as a paradoxical instrument: at once the most personal extension of the body and the most standardized tool of collective labor. Müller’s camera isolates gestures, movements, and tactile encounters, underscoring how hands communicate beyond words—through codes of culture, ritual, and industry.

The work belongs to Müller’s ongoing investigation into the “constructed self,” a theme he has pursued through drawing, installation, and performance. Here, the act of “doing it yourself” is not a celebration of autonomy but a meditation on the limits of self‑determination. The hand, historically tied to craft and creation, is shown as increasingly mediated by systems of production and social expectation. Müller’s looping structure reinforces this tension: gestures repeat, dissolve, and reappear, suggesting that identity itself is caught in cycles of rehearsal and inscription.

By foregrounding the hand, Müller situates the viewer in a liminal space between agency and constraint. The work resonates with broader questions of embodiment in contemporary art: how the body negotiates its role as both subject and instrument, and how the smallest gestures carry the weight of cultural history. Mach dich selbst (Do It Yourself) ultimately asks whether selfhood can ever be “made” in isolation—or whether it is always already shaped by the collective choreography of society.