At Casino Luxembourg, Eva L’Hoest’s The Mindful Hand reflects on how technology reshapes craft, memory, and language, illuminating the fragile frontier between human gesture and machine logic.
As her first major institutional showcase, the Belgian artist stages a dialogue between the analog traditions of image-making and the increasingly pervasive algorithms of the digital age. L’Hoest treats the hand not merely as a tool but as a site of translation between thought and form—between the primal act of making and the virtual abstractions of machine logic.
Through a constellation of new works, L’Hoest explores how digital processes inherit and deform the gestures of the hand. In her Inkstand sculptures, bismuth-tin alloys, shaped by lifecasting and augmented with 3D printing, crystallize the tension between pre-industrial techniques and post-human innovations. Meanwhile, Main Station, a sprawling audiovisual installation, stitches together CGI, analog film, and spoken word poetry into a meditation on presence and absence, inhabitation and emptiness. Here, vacant interiors pulse with spectral life, sustained by the collaborative voices of poet Eva Mancuso and musicians Clara Levy and John Also Bennett.
Language—both visual and verbal—threads through the exhibition with particular intensity. From the inked machine striations of Inkstand to the reprogrammed crowd simulations in Ragdoll, L’Hoest probes how the structures that govern moving images mirror the structures of thought itself. In doing so, The Mindful Hand articulates a profound tension: the fragile seams where human cognition brushes against the synthetic logics of artificial intelligence. L’Hoest suggests that even in our most intimate gestures, technology intervenes—not erasing the human hand, but rendering its touch uncanny and strangely luminous.
