The title is the caller speaking, someone on the other end asking to be held. Movsum Alasgarov never kept his phone on loud, so every call reached him as a vibration, heard or felt, the phone shaking on the table as if it were dancing. It was a Samsung SGH‑X600, the first phone his father bought him. Phones today barely make themselves felt. “Hold Me” is about the ones that did: the first phones made for everyone, in every colour and size, each saying something about the person who carried it. The exhibition is built the same way. Every room takes its own colour and every work its own scale, because no two of those phones were alike.

Movsum, phone study
Movsum, the handset the stack repeats
Movsum, phone study

His generation grew up through that change without noticing it. Its taste was shaped by clothes, music and films, and also by button phones: their shapes, interfaces, ringtones, screens and games. Moving from one handset to the next seemed ordinary. Only looking back is it clear how fast it happened, from a device for making calls to an object that holds almost a whole life. Movsum’s own taste came largely from his mother, and from her love of flip phones, the kind you could snap open and shut in one movement. Hers was a Samsung SCH‑X450, and it rang with “Dilemma” by Nelly and Kelly Rowland. To him they still look like the future.

Movsum, the phone opened into a frame

Early in 2026, after WEATHERMAN, an intense collaboration that set out to go past the limits of consciousness using only art and a computer, he could not make anything. He felt he had reached the edge of the abstract, mathematical thinking his work had been built on, and the harder he pushed as a perfectionist, the worse the work became. In the end he stopped forcing it.

The process itself is the highest manifestation of art, rather than the finished result.

Movsum Alasgarov
Movsum, the evolution of the phone
Movsum, process
Movsum, the same flip phone, a third state

While working with a musician, he traced a violin and ran one of his own brushes along its lines. His brushes are strips of pattern he designs himself, which the software stretches to follow any line it is given. He enjoyed the result and set it aside. Three weeks later he came back to the idea. Since 2025 he had been saving images of old phones, and he took one, a Motorola V2260, and did the same with another brush. He saw then that he did not need the perfect approach, only something simple to start from, and the willingness to let it take him over. For days he looked at the result without showing it to anyone. Something in it was pulling at him, and he still cannot fully say what.

Up close, the phones are dense to the point of excess.

Each shell is built up layer over layer until hardly a bare patch remains: grain and dither, ornament stretched along every

traced line, flat hits of lime, magenta and cyan, laid down one over another like paper in a collage. The strokes that carry it are quick and playful, so all that weight never sits still. What they render is less

the phone than its charge, the calls and messages and the buzz on the table, turned into texture. The forms are pulled almost to chaos, yet each handset stays readable at a glance: a Motorola is still a Motorola from its outline alone. These are phones that still believe something is coming.

Movsum, two handsets

The series grew from that first phone, the Motorola V2260. He first shared the works in their finished form, as phones turned into bricks, isometric compositions in conversation with the space around them. In time he found that most of the pleasure came earlier, while making the phone itself, and the exhibition gives that stage a place of its own. For Movsum the making counts for more than the finished thing. As a work nears completion the editor and the critic take over, and his unconscious has less freedom.

Movsum, Brick 7
Movsum, process
Movsum, Sony

BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung and Motorola each had their own idea of what the future should look like, with its own shapes, buttons, proportions, materials and mechanics.

A phone could flip, slide or rotate, and you could tell what someone was holding from its silhouette.

They were imperfect, sometimes inconvenient, and full of character.

Then the technology grew more powerful and the object grew quieter, until every phone became the same flat rectangle, its personality moved inside the screen.

“We used to laugh at the ‘bricks’ of the past. And somehow, we ended up with the perfect brick. Only now, it’s made of glass.”

Movsum, process
Movsum, phone study

The phone gradually stopped being just an image. He began using it as a way to express his own states.

Instead of directly representing emotions, he filters them through the aesthetics of old futurism, industrial design, and digital graphics.

Movsum, phone study

He wanted to move away from a single system and explore different states of the same phone: form, angles, proportions, space.

Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, phone study
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset
Movsum, a candybar handset

The computer is my co‑author rather than a passive machine.

Movsum Alasgarov
Movsum, Image Trace export in progress, Save for Web shown in 2-Up

01 Illustrator

No AI is involved. Each work starts from a photograph of a phone found online. Image Trace in Illustrator turns it into vector outlines, around every key, seam and screen. He lays his brushes over those outlines, bands of stripes, grids and blocks of blue, yellow and magenta, and waits while the computer bends each one along every path. The vectors are so demanding for the computer that it can take ten attempts to get the result he wants.

02 iPad

The phone then goes to his iPad for colour. He picks each one with the eyedropper, and the iPad spreads it across the form differently every time, in combinations he did not plan. His hand comes in with the details and the composition.

03 Photoshop

Last comes Photoshop, on a canvas of at least 20,000 pixels, where he makes around fifteen compositions and palettes for each phone and mixes them. The phone is finished when it becomes one of his bricks.

Movsum, a flip phone as Image Trace leaves it
Movsum, the same flip phone, worked over by hand
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset
Movsum, a clamshell handset

The future used to be searching for its own shape. Then it found one, and stopped looking.

Movsum Alasgarov