C.B. Evans:Ad Hoc Order

On November 20, 2099, a memory is lost in MEMORY! (2025) a memory is lost. C.B. Evans' video works and sculptures, shown here in the context of our exhibition series for fear of continuity problems, are directed against the debris, waste and toxicity created by the systematic destruction of the future.

C.B. Evans (Belgian-American artist living and working in Saint Denis, France) often uses the form of video installation to create environments in an imagined world. The artworks that make up these environments take up technological, political and social conditions of the present in order to examine and reshape their future effects. Evans' gives these often supposedly abstract constellations an emotional dimension in her works.

The starting point of the exhibition Ad Hoc Order will be the two video works MEMORY! (2025) and RECEPTION! (2024) - character studies of a protagonist and her doppelganger, a memory that has left her body. Both live in a world in which an ecological crisis has led to a shortage of storage space and as a result the population has lost much of its personal data. The interrelated works were first shown at the Sharjah Biennial in 2025, together with the series of works Ad Hoc Order: a seemingly torn open sculptural model that re-imagines the United Nations plenary hall in New York, built on the rubble of the destroyed city. While MEMORY! takes up this environment, RECEPTION! is set in a different space - the former European Parliament, which has been converted into a "Global Archive for Memory Management and Archaeology" (GAMMA). The works show individual characters that, interwoven with computer-generated, found and captured images, build on processes of translation of collective memory and collective responsibility. Both question how and whether memory should survive, given the 'memory crisis' that we will bequeath to future generations, triggered by the wastefulness of our dysfunctional society.