lea van hall
✩ multimedia artist based in paris and vienna ✩
2024 – 2026
2023 – 2024
2019 – 2024
꩜ email: mail@leavanhall.com
꩜ instagram: leavanhall
꩜ cv: ♡
© 2026 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED • LAST UPDATED 28-06-2026
✩ multimedia artist based in paris and vienna ✩
꩜ email: mail@leavanhall.com
꩜ instagram: leavanhall
꩜ cv: ♡
© 2026 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED • LAST UPDATED 28-06-2026
selected works
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photo © Marlene Mautner
interactive installation
sound by Éléa Brando
It’s just you and your imagination and your heart is beating fast as you allow the story to take over. There’s a darkness to it, something forbidden but exciting. It’s soft and warm, yet hard and cold; it feels right but wrong at the same time.
The installation captures the tension around staging violent scenarios with toys and games that don’t suggest violence themselves, and read aesthetically as rather cute. Through interaction and embodiment, the viewer explores play anecdotes from other people's childhoods and experiences the friction that comes with testing boundaries. Where does the desire to be cruel to toys come from and what is being negotiated through this type of play?
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photo © Lea van Hall
interactive installation
sound by Éléa Brando
typography by Tigran Saakyan
Following my research on life simulation video games and their role as a place of self-reflection, exploration and projection of desire, this work consists of a video game set in my own apartment, with the avatar being me. Inspired by object-based video games like Pixel Chix or Tamagotchi, the game is framed by a ceramic object modelled after the façade of my apartment building. The viewer is invited to interact with the game, exploring different objects around the apartment and discovering animations and text fragments collected from different life simulation video games. The work captures the emotion felt by those who have spent hours and hours in front of their screens, immersing themselves in simulated realities, blurring the lines between digital and physical space.
“Real gamers don’t play video games.”
I first came across this phrase in January 2019, originally posted on tumblr by user conceptblogfromaconcepthuman with no further context provided. I’m assuming their intention was to point out how a lot of people passively participate in the gaming community by enjoying its aesthetics and culture through videos, cosplay, etc. without playing any of the games themselves. Calling yourself a „gamer“ ironically no longer involves the action of playing a game. This reminds me of being in elementary school and going over to my best friend’s house to sit next to her in her parents’ office and watch her play The Sims 2. Even though I wasn’t pressing the buttons myself, the game meant a lot to me. When I finally got my own computer, I started existing in Pleasantview on my own terms – that’s when I may have stopped being a „real gamer“, but the game became much more real to me. While the social interactions I had with the NPCs in the game were just a fantasy, an entirely preprogrammed simulation of emotions, the code of the game materialised through the real emotions it made me feel. The pixels on the screen became tangible in the form of butterflies in my stomach.
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video still © Lea van Hall
video (02:26 min)
sound by Éléa Brando
When it comes to soft feelings, the soft part doesn’t need to be taken literally. Softness, tenderness can be born out of harsh, pixelated edges, crunchy low poly fur, cute and caring dialogue options.
There is a place where I can grasp a concept of softness softer than cotton candy clouds – I still have a permanent soft spot for every digital animal that ever loved me.
I wonder what this fuzzy sensation would feel like if I could translate it directly into my fingertips.
photo © Serafima Bresler
various soft sculptures
15 x 120 x 150 cm
Is there such a thing as “the heat of the moment” in a computer program? While my experiences in The Sims 2 were just a projection of my desires onto a bunch of code, the feelings it made me feel materialised outside of the screen.
photo © Lea van Hall
ceramic, animated LEDs
15 x 65 x 6 cm
A digital object changes materiality and has to interact with a new kind of gravity. The object gets subjected to the friction of the physical world. What happens when we apply gaming strategies to our AFK lives?
This project was made in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society at the University of Hamburg and the ICAT Hamburg.
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photo © Lea van Hall
performance with cookies
I am extremely aware of all the unread messages in my phone – it becomes almost like a physical sensation, a heaviness or pressure I feel in my pocket. Of course the messages are not actually unread, I know exactly what they say from seeing the notifications, I just haven’t opened them yet. I’m pretty sure everyone knows that unopened does not equal unread, yet I like to think that I’m able to give people the illusion that I just actually haven’t gotten around to seeing their message.
Thinking about gamification as a strategy to boost productivity, the cookies become a reward system, their shape resembling video game rewards/currency, or, in a more analogue way, the gold star „well done“ sticker.
The more overwhelming the amount of messages in my inbox becomes, the harder it becomes to reply to them. The anxiety of having to reply to these messages keeps me up at night. The star shaped cookies become reminiscent of the glow-in-the-dark stickers I used to have on my ceiling as child.
The time spent baking and decorating these cookies is easily enough to reply to all my messages. This act of procrastination is calming and anxiety-inducing at the same time. Baking is very meditative for me, yet the messages are always in the back of my mind – friends I’ve been ignoring, work emails I haven’t taken care of.
Maybe the reason I end up ghosting people when I really don’t mean to is that I’m not built to be reachable all the time.
The performance consists of me answering my unread messages and emails. Each cookie respresents one message that I need to send. For each message that I sent, I get to eat one cookie. The performance ends when there are no more cookies and maybe for a minute I will be able to feel some relief... until the new messages start coming in.
photo © Jung Min Lee
ceramic, site-specific sculpture at Gröninger Hof, Hamburg
Staring at the hundreds of tiles covering the walls of this old car workshop, I imagined each of them as a plane in blender that I could easily move around and manipulate by adding modifiers to them. What if they were made out of pixels instead of ceramics? I could make the digital material behave like anything I want: fabrics, liquid, jelly, sand. After transforming the tiles digitally, I turned them back into physical ceramic objects and placed them in the space alongside the rest of the tiles in their original form.
photo © Lea van Hall
found object, modified
typography by Tigran Saakyan
„Don‘t eat too much candy, ok?“ is a quote from a Tamagotchi game that stood out to me. In a game that is based on caring for an imaginary companion that relies on you to keep them alive, there is a moment where this being starts „caring back“.
As I am simulating caring for an imaginary friend and this character is simulating caring for me as well, if I truly feel cared for through this imaginary interaction, what role does it play that it’s a simulation?
photo © Lea van Hall
ceramic, video loop
Objects made out of ambiguous materials creating images of ambiguous video games – using aesthetics commonly found in games described as cute, relaxing, cozy and satisfying, I created a video loop of what looks like a very reduced, minimalist video game. How far can I abstract the elements of a game so that, when arranged on the screen in a way that a game scene is usually constructed, it will read as a video game to the viewer? I am curious about this universal, intuitive visual language we can find across all kinds of video games.