•
Path Dependency
Eva L'Hoest
exhibition views at Artopia Gallery, Milan
9th May - 12th July 2024
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.
•
Photos by Michela Pedranti
Eva L'Hoest
In her sculptures, performances and audiovisual installations, Eva L’Hoest uses digital technology as an archaeologist’s tool to interpret, distort, saturate or alter the blurred images of memory. She has recently exhibited at the Sydney Biennale, Australia; at the WIELS, Brussels, Belgium; at the Frac Grand Large, Dunkirk, France; at the Riga Contemporary Art Biennale, Latvia; at the Malmö Museum, Sweden; at the Lyon Biennale, curated by the Palais de Tokyo, France; at the Okayama Art Summit 2019, curated by Pierre Huyghe, Japan; in 2018, her videos were screened at Les Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Visite Film Festival, Vidéographie 21 and in the form of live performances at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Holland. Her films were also screened at the Centre Pompidou Kanal, Bruxelles; Louvre Auditorium in Paris; the Carreaux du Temple in Paris; the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; the Muhka and Het Bos in Antwerp.