Cécile B. Evans

Reception! stars acclaimed actress Guslagie Malanda as a woman named Reception who is one of the last human translators on Earth. In the wake of a storage crisis that has seen the erasure of digital memory from personal devices, Reception works in a former parliament hemicycle that has been repurposed as a data center. She receives a transmission of a woman’s intimate memory. The woman speaks in Irish Gaelic and Reception interprets her experience into French, faithfully dictating to a machine that transcribes it to history in English. In this vigorous process of receiving and transitioning the woman’s memory, Reception’s own memory escapes her and goes rogue in the showspace. In a choreographed screen ballet, the memory moves onto Reception’s personal storage devices, enforcing the link between what we hold in our bodies and what is kept in the objects we carry with us.

HYPERLINKS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital beings—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—as they search for meaning. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to raise questions about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.

AGNES, a bot who lives on the Serpentine Galleries website, has overheard someone saying that there will be an end.

Reality or Not narrates the intriguing tale of a group of high school students nestled in the northern suburbs of Paris. They embark on a daring experiment, one that seeks to seize control of the reality enveloping them and reshape it according to their own vision. The project marks the latest milestone in the extensive research journey undertaken by the artist Cécile B. Evans, spanning the entirety of their career.

Reception! stars acclaimed actress Guslagie Malanda as a woman named Reception who is one of the last human translators on Earth. In the wake of a storage crisis that has seen the erasure of digital memory from personal devices, Reception works in a former parliament hemicycle that has been repurposed as a data center. She receives a transmission of a woman’s intimate memory. The woman speaks in Irish Gaelic and Reception interprets her experience into French, faithfully dictating to a machine that transcribes it to history in English. In this vigorous process of receiving and transitioning the woman’s memory, Reception’s own memory escapes her and goes rogue in the showspace. In a choreographed screen ballet, the memory moves onto Reception’s personal storage devices, enforcing the link between what we hold in our bodies and what is kept in the objects we carry with us.

Unraveling the value of emotion in contemporary society, the work of Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans explores the person-to-machine exchanges that have come to define the contemporary human condition. Her video installation What the Heart Wants examines what constitutes a person in the digital age and how machines (technical, social, and political) shape how we are “human.” If “corporations are people too,” as in the notion of corporate personhood, then HYPER, an ambiguous power and the narrator of the video, has achieved this ultimate goal. Amidst the dizzying paradoxes of future-turned-now, she is joined by a range of other protagonists: an immortal cell, a memory from 1972 that has outlived the humans who would have remembered it, a disbanded trio of off-grid lovers, lab children with their robot caregiver, and a workers’ collective comprised entirely of disembodied ears.

This experimental screen test for an adaptation of the industrial-era ballet Giselle has been reimagined as an ecofeminist thriller. Weaving together digital footage, 16mm, VHS recordings, animation and deep AI, the screen test is a proposal for a hybridised world in a near future where multiple realities push to the surface.

In the world of self-regarding architect Amos, there’s really only one thing that matters—Amos. There he is, sensibly chic in a black roll-neck sweater and neat gray trousers: “I want to build something important. I want to change the world. I want to express myself.” Amos is Cécile B. Evans’s amalgam of the twentieth-century starchitects who shaped the post-war built environment. Conceived as a mock TV series set in a Brutalist housing estate, her exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway comprises three separate videos (or “episodes”). Made between 2017 and 2018 and collectively titled “Amos’ World,” each is screened concurrently in accompanying installations with soundtracks played on headphones. Dotted around the space are props and sets used on screen: scale-model shelves of colored binders, a miniature forest. As “Amos’ World” suggests, the egoistic visionaries Amos parodies were not ultimately in control of their designs. Evans emphasizes this point by rendering Amos as a jerky puppet.