Cécile B. Evans | Exhibition Coming Soon
Cécile B. Evans is an American-Belgian artist living and working in Saint-Denis.
Evans’ work examines the value of emotion and its rebellion as it comes into contact with ideological, physical, and technological structures. They are currently working on a new performance commission for the MOVE festival at Centre Pompidou Paris (FR).
Recent selected solo exhibitions include 49 Nord 6 Est - Frac Lorraine (FR), Museum Abteiberg (DE), Tramway (UK), Chateau Shatto (US), Museo Madre (IT), mumok Vienna (AT), Castello di Rivoli (IT), Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna (AT), Tate Liverpool (UK), Kunsthalle Aarhus (DK), M Museum Leuven (BE), De Hallen Haarlem (NL), and Serpentine Galleries (UK).
Evans’ work has been included amongst others at Lafayette Anticipations (FR), Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Haus der Kunst (DE), Mito Art Tower (JP), Renaissance Society Chicago (US), the 7th International Moscow Biennale (RU), the 4th Ural Industrial Biennial (RU), Galerie Kamel Mennour (FR), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (DK), the 9th Berlin Biennale (DE), the 20th Sydney Biennale (AUS), Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (ES), and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (FR).
Evans’ films have been screened in festivals such as the New York Film Festival and Rotterdam International. Public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York (US), The Rubell Family Collection, Miami (US), Whitney Museum of American Art (US), De Haallen (NL), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (IT), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (DK), and FRAC Auvergne (FR).
Transcript
Hello. My name is Cécile B. Evans, and I make mostly installed films, but that encompasses collages, video installations, sculpture, and performance. But everything always revolves around this moment that our feelings or our emotions come into contact with the structures that are meant to contain our everyday lives. So that could be ideological, technological, physical. And the reason I'm interested in that point of contact is that even though these structures’ intention is to contain us and for us to fit within them, a lot of times our emotions rebel when they're put into contact with them. And I'm interested in that rebellion and what we could learn from it the moment where our feelings don't behave the way that a structure or a system wants it to, and how we can take strength and power from that, and how it can help us understand that that might not be us, that might be the structures themselves.
The idea for Reality or Not: The Film came from actually a reality TV series that I've watched for a very long time and quite obsessively, called “The Real Housewives”. “The Real Housewives” takes place in different cities. You have “The Real Housewives” of Beverly Hills, Potomac, New York. It goes on and on and on. But over the course of watching it, I would say in the last 10 years, I started to notice that certain cast members, when a season would start, they could identify very quickly what the narrative for them was going to be, whether decided by a producer or the show itself or another cast member. So not from them, but very much like something in that constructed reality. And they started to actually reject those story lines. And you see in the film, actually, one of the most famous moments where this happened, where one of the cast members actually says “I refuse the storyline. It's not happening”. And I thought this point of rejecting a reality that's being imposed on you was really interesting to see at a time when a lot of people feel like there are no other options. We've accepted this dominant reality that we call life, and a lot of people are frustrated and don't feel like they have the possibility to reject the situation. So I was not only interested in that as an alternative, but also the source, that came from a reality TV cast member who is not a politician, who is not a scholar, who is not someone who would be acceptable to challenge this.
Two other more theoretical sources were Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism. So they proposed this idea that we have this cruel optimism. An example would be the American life, that we have these values that we uphold and that we aspire to, but that actually this optimism towards these things are the very things that make things bad and make things not feel good. And then a second really strong thing that made me want to pursue this idea of the production of reality was Federico Campagna's Magic and Technique. So there's this passage in the book where he talks about Sicilian puppet theatre and how the audience could always see the moment that a background changes, and that the background or the reality becomes a character, and the audience starts to anticipate the arrival of new characters. And on the one hand, I really liked this because I'm always looking at characters within films as a way to talk about really big ideas and themes, but also this anticipation of a new background, of a new context, which I think is not something we really anticipate much anymore. All of the films and installations I make are really densely packed with references, and they're not references that I want people or need people to know. To me, they're a subliminal way for people to have a sense of familiarity, and that's also why it's important to have a really, really broad range of references. So while you might not know the reference, you might have a sense of familiarity. It could be a song. So Eña was a huge point of reference for the film. And you encounter an homage or different covers of Eña, specifically because I think she's a formidable musician. And culturally, that music has been relegated to a less serious category of New Age. I find that really interesting because it's actually really powerful. Another huge reference is “La Commune de Paris”, which was essentially a revolution within Paris, where the inhabitants decided they no longer wanted to be a part of France, and they wanted to declare Paris a territory and form a new government. And this has always been described to me as a radical leftist movement, and I really idealised it, but the more I learned about it and the more that I listened and also thought about other things that were happening at the time, like the Algerian Revolution, against French colonisers, I started to wonder… I talked before about Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism that we might have towards certain things, and maybe a cruel optimism we have towards the left or our established ideas of what Europe is, and that this has become a value in daily European or even American life that maybe doesn't really benefit us to uphold anymore. And then there's just so many references. I could go on forever. But I think rather than doing an Easter egg hunt through them, I'm always, as an artist, more excited to see what other people see, because sometimes even audience members will come, will write to the studio and talk about; “Oh, it really reminded me of this”, or “Were you referencing that?”. And sometimes I wasn't at all. It just means that that person or those people and I were just people who live in the world and who are paying attention. And inevitably, these really niche references open up doors to really broad, important questions that we're all having.
The proposition to work with a group of young people was really exciting. It came from the Fondation, but it was also something I had thought of before, in the sense that I needed an aspect of the project that just couldn't be controlled. I think as an artist, there's a big responsibility to control all the different aspects and elements of a project. I always collaborate with a lot of people, but at the end of the day, the project is my responsibility. And I thought, if I'm talking about reality and also the construction of reality for other people, I needed to have young people who, for me, at least, the only way to work with young people is to give them full control and agency over the situation so that it wasn't about inviting them to participate in the film, but about them choosing to make an intervention in the film. And me, really having to remain flexible and to receive that, whatever that meant for the overarching film, which had other worlds that I was needing to control and guide. I think this radically changed the way that I look at work. There was something incredibly liberating about it, something really scary about it in a way, not knowing about also showing up, because we work together for a whole school year, and each time showing up and not really being able to fully anticipate what was going to happen because I was always facing 13 to 16 people who I felt I needed to be accountable for not just their needs, but what they wanted. In the film, there's a line in the middle of a monologue that establishes that minors and kids and young people are not property. And I think so often, especially within institutions, there's a sense of ownership or even a need to protect young people, but that this actually is in some ways a form of restricting them. And I was very aware from the beginning that it was just important to consistently check in with that and make sure that the project wasn't behaving like an institution in that way.
The Realitarians, in the film, we hear through the voice of a narrator who we may or may not understand was their art teacher, that she once had a group of exceptional students who were invited to participate in an American reality TV production about how they wanted to live together. And these young people, over the course of the film, we watched them not really make good TV. They decide to take this proposition really, sincerely and earnestly, and they start a practice of shifting, which is known amongst young people in real life as a movement that spread across TikTok during the lockdowns, during the pandemic, where essentially, they would shift worlds from their current reality to a desired reality, whatever that was. And through this group of young people, you're introduced to not just different worlds, but different characters. You meet a former Realhousewife of Algier, who is also a hacker and basically runs a scam site to get the personal information of the President of the International Monetary Fund to take down the IMF. You also meet a statue who is furious with its status as a symbol and decides to take down the entire symbolic world with it. You also encounter an anti-universe generating its own space and time because it's always important to have this aspect of the non-human element. And importantly, the students are very influenced by a collective collective of renders, who are a group of rejected virtual influencers, as in, they never made it to being a virtual influencer. So these CGI, cyber-humans, who have defected from the company's hard drive and have formed a worker's collective that are anti-time. It's very complex, but that's also why the role of the Realitarians was always to bring it back to something that people could easily identify with, something really real. These are real young people. The questions that they're asking in the film are really theirs. It was completely unscripted in that way. I'm so proud of the project and of what it managed to capture that was honestly already present within them. I'm excited for other people to discover just a part of that.