Cécile B. Evans

Cécile B. Evans is an American-Belgian artist living and working in London. Evans’ work examines the value of emotion and its rebel-lion as it comes into contact with ideological, physical, and technological structures. For the last 10 years, they have been producing large scale video installations that move across film, sculpture, scenography and performance. These bodies of work have been commissioned and exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (FR), Berlin Biennale (DE), Sydney Biennale (AU), Tate Liver-pool (UK), Haus der Kunst (DE), Tramway (UK), Madre Museum (IT), and Mumok Vienna (AT)- amongst others. Evans has works held in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), Whitney Museum of American Art (US), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (DK), and Castello di Rivoli (IT).

With Le Fresnoy, Cécile B. Evans will embark on an investigation into the production of reality, asking who is able to produce their own reality and on what terms. Combining historical and actual references, as well as the generation of fictional characters and timelines, Evans will be focused on the creation of a new film that will span multiple genres and materialities. Building on previous works, the film will use techniques as diverse as CGI, deep AI, stop-motion anima-tion, live performance, and rotoscope alongside divergent formats like 16mm, HD cinema camera, VHS, and first person action.

Weaving multiple narrative threads, the film introduces an elderly woman who describes being a part of a radical group of school chil-dren that seized power over their own reality and attempted a new way of existing. Captured as part of a reality television series, we witness footage of the children begin a practice of “shifting”- a process that enables them to move through different realities to attain a range of subjective experiences. This premise opens up a number of realms: a hacker using a livestream platform to operate an anti-imperialist bling ring, a blind messenger pigeon, a statue of the Iceni tribal leader Boadicea discontent with her status as a symbol, and an anti-universe generating its own space, time, and content. The premise of the film will shift throughout Evans’ time with Le Fresnoy, accommodating the illegibility of certain realities and asking how humans can accept the imperceivable breadth that reality can hold.