Cécile B. Evans – Working on What the Heart Wants

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Lira Gallery is happy to announce a solo exhibition with a new video work by Cécile B. Evans.

In her work Cécile B. Evans examines the value of emotion in contemporary society and the increasing influence of new technologies on how we feel and act. Evans employs installation, video, sculpture, online platforms and performance to address how person-to-machine exchanges reflect the wider contemporary human condition.

Evans' recent works, AGNES (2014) and Hyperlinks or It Didn't Happen (2014) addressed the lives of digital beings and our relationship to them. Her latest work What the Heart Wants builds on these ideas to consider how these blurred relations, and the mechanisms underlying them, might effect our idea of humanity. Set in the future, centered around a new system called HYPER, it imagines what it means to be 'a person'.

Working on What the Heart Wants live-streams the production of this world as it is being built. Through three screens connected to specially programmed computers, the visitor is exposed to the network of individuals building the system itself and get an inside view of Evans' upcoming installation ‚What the Heart Wants' presented this year at the 9th Berlin Biennale.

Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian American artist based in London. She is the 2012 recipient of the Emdash Award (now Frieze Award) and the 2013 recipient of the Push Your Art Prize, resulting in the commission of a new video work for the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). She is the creator of AGNES, the first digital commission for the Serpentine Galleries (curated by Ben Vickers), a project which has grown internationally across platforms.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Winterthur (CH), De Hallen Amsterdam (NL), Tate Liverpool (UK) and the Kunsthal Aarhus (DK). In 2016 she will be participating at the 9th Berlin Biennale (DE) and the Moscow Biennal of Young Art (RU). Current and recent exhibitions include MOCA Cleveland (US), Bielefelder Kunstverein (solo, DE), Sydney Biennale (AU), Kunsthalle Wien (AT). In 2014 she had a solo exhibition at Seventeen Gallery (London) and was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize (PinchukArtCentre, Kiev). She is a 2015 recipient of an Andaz Award. Group exhibitions include Inhuman, at Fridericianum (Kassel), TTTT at Jerwood Visual Arts Foundation (London), La Voix Humaine at Kunstverein Munich, Phantom Limbs at Pilar Corrias Gallery (London), and CO-WORKERS at Musée d'art Moderne (Paris). Recent screenings include the ICA London,
V&A (London), BFI (London), and Hamburg Film Festival. A number of grants and residencies have supported her work, such as Wysing Arts Centre (UK), CCA Andratx (SP), and the Arts Council England and recent symposiums include ICA Salon London, Art Basel Conversations, Global Art Forum, and Rhizome's Seven on Seven.