2022

Eva L’Hoest (*1991, Belgium) explores how all types of mental images, in particular memory and reminiscence, are able to reappear in a technological form. She is most interested in exploring memory and its infinitesimal and strange lingering reality. Piece by piece, the artist appropriates contemporary technology to reveal both their nature as prosthesis for capturing the world and their potential as an artistic medium.

“Eva L’Hoest has been creating a delicate dystopian universe for several years. Between fictional and real ruins, the moving images of her films and installations explore the meanders of memory - human and nonhuman - reminiscent of larger economic and environmental issues”, says curator and writer Antoinette Jattiot. “For the realization of her fictional landscapes inspired by natural or domestic contexts, she mingles different technical image processes (3D scans, modeling, direct capture, special effects generators) with research on subjects as vast and precise as the study of vanities, systems of measurement or ancestral beliefs. Along the slow travellings of her films, water, nature, bodies, and architectural motifs often merge into a whole that decompartmentalizes the scales and makes the viewer fall into the heart of a fragmented matter in resonance with the complexity of the living. The plasticity of the images sewn from metadata and from technological and scientific vocabularies also defies the power of the algorithms from which she draws inspiration and which she dissects. In the interstices of indeterminate, fragile and shimmering spaces, the artist questions transparency, the transfer of data and surveillance systems. Eva L’Hoest never gives up on reality, as evidenced by her practice of 3D sculpture and virtual reality that sometimes complements her films and installations. Her approach to the photographic image, whether sculptural, digital or conceptual, reveals and deconstructs ecosystems that alert us to our relationship to space and the digital era. Poetically, she explores the state of the world, our capacity to inhabit time and the power of contemplation.”

Eva L’Hoest was nominated by Marie du Chastel, the Artistic Director of KIKK Festival, Namur.

Nika Schmitt

Born in Luxembourg in 1992, works and lives in Rotterdam (NL)

“In her work with rhythm and patterns, (…) Nika Schmitt shows how data is formed in contact with other data and how this interactive relationship is connected to one’s own sensory experiences”, write Sandra Schwender and Carl Rethmann.

“For her, each space can be broken down into its components. Light, sound and temperature are measured and altered through minimal interventions, the new combination thus distorting the experience of space and time. Therefore, she plays with expectations and the human inclination for regularity while always remaining unpredictable, like the element of chance infiltrating almost all of her created systems from the outside. With her kinetic sound installations with mostly self-made mechanical systems, Nika Schmitt tells stories that are connected to the places where the works are located. With empathy and a lot of humour, the viewer is led into the artist’s universe of light and sound immersed in a multi-sensory experience.”

Nika Schmitt was nominated by Marc Scozzai (Rotondes) and Sandra Schwender (Centre national de l’audiovisuel, CNA).