Path Dependency
Eva L'Hoest
Upcoming exhibition
May 9, 2024 - July 12, 2024
Eva L'Hoest, What hath God wrought?, Mono-channel video, 15min
The ground floor hosts the exhibition Path Dependency by Belgian artist Eva L'Hoest (Liège, 1991), which addresses the increasingly close and conditioning relationship between technology, nature and the role of man in this complex and intimate network, a recurring motif in her artistic practice. The works exhibited, arranged in line with the specificity of the space, reflect on the visible and invisible forces that shape our world and offer a glimpse into the blind areas of our civilisation.
Path Dependency is displayed on the ground floor and opens with One hundred staring sheep (2024), a photographic diptych that is significant for understanding the evolution of Eva L'Hoest's approach. The two photographic prints reveal the physical limits of the mirrors of a 3D scanner during the reconstruction of a landscape in Belgium, a method also frequently used during inspections inside nuclear power plants or at crime scenes. In the digital space created by the artist, the scene of relations with a specific place, the human eye is replaced according to a process comparable to analogue photography. In the images created by L'Hoest, stopped at a stage just before their final processing, one can simultaneously read proximity and distance from the landscape, in a fruition whose time is marked by signs of technological derivation.
The artist's sculptural construction forms are revealed in the toxic layers of Consecrated Lightning! (2023) - in which waste and industrial processing scraps seem to camouflage themselves in organic forms - and in the cartographic measuring instruments inspired by the Etruscan gromes of Don't Feed The Birds (2021). The two works look at anthropic actions as inevitable transformations of the environment: connecting the world and connecting to the world through one's body has led human beings to order their surroundings through a dense network of roads and cables dedicated to transporting energy and information.
A connection that manifests itself in Scaffold Mechanics - video sculpture (2023) and What Hath God Wrought? (2023), which together explore an event from the past that can shape the identity of our digital existences. Both works feature a strong component of CGI (computer generated images) and share a common origin: they refer to the history of telegraph lines and, more specifically, to the positioning of submarine cables between Singapore and Australia. A historical event in which even materials such as gutta-percha are laden with colonial meanings and whose consequences can still be read today.
Eva L'Hoest
Eva L'Hoest's practice uses digital language as an archaeologist's tool to address questions of origins and memories. Through combinations of sculptures, performances and audiovisual installations, she explores the way in which collective and individual mental images can be reactivated and reanimated in technological forms. Starting from reality and the situation of the body within it, Eva L'Hoest appropriates contemporary technologies in their capacity to record and expose the world by revealing new narratives and forms, inscribed in the limits and potentials of machines. Eva L'Hoest infiltrates the data of our digital age as much as primary mythologies and thus brings to the surface visual and audible forms that create new territories of relationships, at the crossroads of distinct worlds, times and media.
Her work has recently been shown at « RIVUS », Biennale of Sydney, Australia ; « Regenerate », WIELS, Brussels, Belgium; « Un autre monde, dans notre monde » , F.dt. Agnès B., FRAC Grand Large in Dunkirk; the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel; « ShapeShifters », Malmö Museum, Sweden ; the Lyon Biennale “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water” curated by Palais de Tokyo, FR; The Triennale of Okayama Art Summit 2019 “IF THE SNAKE” curated by Pierre Huyghe, Okayama, Japan; Suspended time, Extended space”, Casino Luxembourg Luxembourg; “Fluo Noir”, BIP2018, Liege, Belgium; “WHSS” (Melange, Koln, Germany). In 2018, her videos have been screen at Les Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, the Visite Film Festival, Vidéographie 21 and in the form of a live performance at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Screenings of her films were also held at Carreaux du Temple (Paris, France), Le Louvre Auditorium (Paris, France), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany), Muhka and Het Bos (Antwerp,
Belgium).