Eva L’Hoest’s The Mindful Hand at Casino Luxembourg
Mathieu Buchler
Walking up the steps of Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain, the hand glides smoothly along the rail, leading you, guiding you past a turn in the staircase and up towards the first-floor exhibition halls housing the works of Eva L’Hoest (1991). Hands, railings, metallic frames – all recurring themes in The Mindful Hand, the Belgian artist’s first solo show in a major institution, curated by Vincent Crapon and Stilbé Schroeder. Upstairs, the viewer is met with In the Belly of a Small God, a large 3D-printed black sculpture showing a high relief of stretched-out human and animal figures caught between pensive reflection and painful contortion. Plastic filaments left by the 3D-printer are visible, forming thin stalactite traces, while the organic shapes have been stretched beyond recognition during the digital translation of an existing image into a 3D copy. The background is lined with a grid-like structure laying bare the production process of 3D-printing while also intimating a joint dimensional plane on which image, digital facsimile and physical sculpture converge.
Lit rather inconsequentially, the work sets a clear tone for the rest of the exhibition. Conceptually, the exhibition reflects the interplay between human bodies and technology, manual skills and digital manipulation, and how analog and digital images affect our perception, memory, and the relationship between the hand and mind. By digitally altering 2D or analog images or by sculpting 3D models to be reproduced in the physical world, Eva L’Hoest captures remnants of the interplay between intentional artistic creation and the agency of algorithmic and technical processes, envisioning new spatial and temporal forms.
The question of art and technology is a complex one. Technology as tékhnē, or the application of knowledge for creation, has been a common understanding since the Ancient Greeks and was intimately tied to the idea of poiesis, or bringing something into being. The relation between technology and artistry, therefore, has a longstanding history. In more recent times, with Ernst Kapp and Marshall McLuhan, technology and media were thought to be extensions of the human body and cognition, serving as instruments for interacting with the world. Eva L’Hoest seeks to engage these questions in light of more recent digital innovations, which pose challenging questions about how humans, in turn, have started to become extensions of technology in data harvesting efforts of tech corporations or as data points in algorithmic systems. Finding the right critical tone in the digital age is still difficult, given the fact that our interaction with digital tools is caught between helpful symbiosis and blatant exploitation. AI and algorithms turn human interaction, movement and language into a feedback loop designed to shape organic unexpectancies into artificial expectancies, while humans readily employ these tools as servants in their desire for order and efficiency. The frame of the question of technology is caught in a type of double-bind in which neither understanding is fully sufficient, leading to rather static reflections in otherwise dynamic times. Even within new media and digital art, it is often difficult to find answers to this philosophical standstill, since many works either skip out on these questions, instead focusing on the visual aspect of digital media, or by enacting digital doomsaying while, ironically, employing the exact tools they wish to decry. Martin Heidegger may have foretold this rigidity in our current thinking of technology in his essay The Question Concerning Technology, in which he denominates technology as a Gestell or frame halting humans in their reflective practice. Nevertheless, he saw in art a potential to lead to a new liberation of thought. Eva L’Hoest reconsiders this implicit standstill by presenting works that not only force reflection but, paradoxically, use the metaphor of the guiding frame as a potential liberating shape.
In the main exhibition hall, the series Inkstand – Fragments of Intents presents several smaller sculptures in bismuth-tin alloy encased in boxes lined with mirrors and lit from within. The sculptures, reminiscent of the first sculpture, show human and animal figures in seemingly historical or fictional environments formed and cast in sand moulds. Mainly depicting domestic scenes, they are doubly enframed: first, within their own house- or cave-like structures and, second, within their box. The boxes are designed to represent Skinner boxes, used to study positive reinforcement techniques and social conditioning methods on animals. These have since influenced deep-learning algorithms. The notion of framing and a sense of claustrophobia capture the idea that technologies are reshaping, perhaps restricting, our interactions with the world. However, while this series hints at a delimiting factor of technology, it also offers a path forward. The boxes are fastened onto metal railings leading the viewer from one box to the next, thus simultaneously suggesting a path forward. Moreover, the mirrors within the cases create an infinite sequence of reflections, which further bursts the metaphorical frame into multiple potential variations and perspectives, all contained within the very mechanisms of control in which the sculptures are placed.
This idea of a guided path continues in Main Station, an audiovisual installation on four screens using 16mm film layered with digitally rendered footage. The videos are supplemented by a reading of a text written by Eva Mancuso, evoking the notion of space, memory and the female condition, and by a musical piece for violin, flute and synthesiser composed and performed by Clara Levy and John Also Bennett. Watching all four projections simultaneously, the viewer’s eyes are guided as the shots travel from one projection screen to the next, or while the camera travels through corridors on visible rails. It soon becomes apparent that the footage has been taken within the walls of Casino Luxembourg, showing archives, cellars, exhibition halls, views from windows or outside the building and other details the artist explored for this show. The artificial layering of analog footage with digitally rendered elements appears flat at first, but upon embracing the experience, their appearance shifts and turns natural. The digitally altered images take on their own reality and implant themselves into the viewer’s memory, almost as an echo or murmur of a distant history which now finds resonance in our present. The interplay of sound and image, especially the meditative voice-over and slow tracking shots, creates a stretched-out experience of time in which losing oneself in associative reflection becomes possible. By directing two types of images towards each other, or perhaps inwards, they begin taking on a new form. Again, it is within a guiding frame of both voice and cinematography that alternate shapes of thinking emerge.
Off to the right of the projections, the visitor is met with Ragdoll, an installation consisting of a PMMA sculpture positioned centrally and three smaller sculptures displayed on the wall. More explicitly about new technologies, Ragdollis the result of glitching systems-driven simulation tools. The sculpture shows several human 3D-models interlocked and intertwined because they all assume the same position in space, as if they spawned simultaneously in the same location, causing their models to overlap. The sculpture reflects on tools for simulating crowd behaviours, grappling with our algorithmic desires to force order upon chaotic human behaviour. Eva L’Hoest’s focus lies in laying bare how such digital systems can easily be broken by toying with the user’s ability to twist the rules of physical space in a 3D-rendered environment, thus breaking the frame or ruleset intended by the software. This same notion is explored in the sculptures on the wall, which all show printed 3D models of spaces inside Casino Luxembourg that are softly blown up by injecting them with digital matter. Digital space is revealed to be a malleable matrix which, when used to render the laws of physical space, allows for unexpected interactions and hitherto unthinkable forms.
Finally, the viewer is led into a dark room to marvel at The Cave, The Cage, The Chorus. A basket-like guardrail surrounds a giant zoetrope showcasing a series of twenty-four heads in a circle. As the zoetrope starts catching momentum and the strobe lights turn on, it creates the illusion of the head being sculpted in real-time. This dizzying experience is accompanied by sound recordings of the Paris Stock Exchange in the 1960s, evoking chaotic scenes of financial analysis, speculation about the future and the fragility of systems stirred by human reason and emotion. The finished sculpted head is is wearing a blindfold, suggesting a lack of vision for our present. In fact, beyond an economic tool, recent innovations in AI are yet to take on a clear form in a broader social and even artistic sense. Still, their reality is apparent, continuously shaping themselves almost autonomously into updates and modifications. Unless all of this motion is but an illusion in the end, a myth in a digital cave, dreamed up by our eyes and brains who turn it into fluid motion? The rail here turns in circles, as do the viewer’s questions. What remains is Eva L’Hoest’s artistic intent to formally capture this confusion.
After viewing the exhibition, one could mistake the variety of used media and consequent divergence in visual identity as the result of a lack of technical or conceptual refinement in both the artist’s and curators’ vision. It being the artist’s first solo show, such thoughts are justified. However, it rather seems to me that the works avoid settling for a homogenic digital aesthetic in favour of placing a disjointed form at the heart of the content. Given the subject matter at hand, the stark contrasts between conditioning frames, metallic matter and the filaments of 3D-prints in Inkstand – Fragments of Intent and the subtleties of both Main Station and Ragdoll capture the very paradoxes – between humans and machines, manual craft and digital manipulation, analog images and rendered pixels – which the exhibition seeks to highlight.
Whirring up the opposition between rigid determinism and liberating arbitrariness beyond a fixed answer in The Cave, The Cage, The Chorus, the exhibition leaves us pondering our need to resort to strict dichotomic categorisations when discussing art, humans and technology, and how distinguishing between diametrically opposed concepts comes close to philosophical blindness. Furthermore, what makes this exhibition so striking is that it is with skilful determination that the delimiting frame itself becomes the central piece, showing up in the shape of enclosed containers, hand- and tracking rails or a basket-like cage. The symbol of the frame suggest a potential paradigm, welling up within the walls of a 3D-printed Casino Luxembourg and gushing out with soft intensity, within which to rethink our relation to technology.
This show thus bursts the Heideggerian notion that technology enframes and limits us in our understanding of the world. In turn, it echoes, perhaps beyond what Heidegger saw, the potential of art to create a guiding structure, both elucidating and mystifying, through and beyond which we can think the relationship of art and technology as a surprising gift of novel ideas, familiar yet uncanny shapes and potential frameworks. A mindful hand, thus, reaching out and guiding, leading the way.
The Mindful Hand by Eva L’Hoest, curated by Vincent Crapon and Stilbé Schroeder, is on view at Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain from 01.02-11.05.2025.
All the pictures (except head, Luk Vanderplaetse) by Mathieu Buchler