Christophe Muylaert

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is a reflective installation on the human impulse to construct causality from coincidence.

A dual-channel video loop shows two isolated events: on the left, a match suddenly ignites; on the right, a candle begins to burn moments later. The scale and brightness of both images are identical, yet they remain separated, suspended in their own visual fields. No flame ever touches the candle. There is only a temporal sequence — a mere juxtaposition in time. Still, the mind instinctively forges a causal link: the match must have lit the candle.

Beneath the projection, a 3D-printed platform holds a match and a candle, cast in resin. Frozen in their material stillness, they cannot physically interact. Their petrified presence further destabilises the viewer’s expectation of cause and effect.

By provoking and then undermining the assumption of causal necessity, the work echoes David Hume’s critique: that causation is not a property of the world, but a habit of the mind — an interpretative glue applied to successive perceptions. What appears as a chain of events may be nothing more than correlation, coincidence, or narrative desire.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc invites us to reconsider the certainty with which we attribute meaning, agency, and explanation to the world. It challenges the foundation upon which much of our reasoning rests, exposing how fragile, constructed, and illusory the notion of causality can be.