Сесил Би Эванс

straight up

source: blouinartinfo

Cécile B. Evans has been announced as the recipient of the 2012 Emdash Award. The Belgian-American artist, who is based in Berlin, will create a bespoke audio guide for Frieze Art Fair’s 10th edition, opening next October in Regent’s Park, London. Evans’s interactive piece will compile comments by a wide range of people, none of them art specialists, but instead bringing them together “under this umbrella of Britishness, which I think will be a really lovely tie-in,” she told ARTINFO UK.

“I’ve been working for a while with this idea of inserting emotional value into explaining an exhibition,” Evans continued. Her project, which resonates with seminal works by the likes of Andrea Fraser, will investigate the discrepancy between the seen and the heard, the art on display and the discourse that surrounds the spectacle — or, indeed, the lack thereof.

“I went through a phase of watching a lot of British panel shows, and really fell in love in them,” Evans explained. “It’s really similar to the audio guide in that you have this sort of miss-matching of various personalities from different walks of life — and then the goal is not necessarily to find the correct answer but what happens along the way.”

Evans’s piece will also comprise a hologram “ghost” guide, cropping up in various areas of the fair. It will “introduce another authoritative element,” the artist said, “so that you have the authority of this wacky group of people’s emotions, versus the viewer’s experience of [the art], and all of a sudden that’s interrupted further by this hologram.”

The audio guide’s soundtrack will have to be recorded prior the fair’s opening, and comments based on whatever information is available to the artist and her performers at the time — potentially adding a further gap between exhibition and explanations. “Hopefully, in the end, the viewer actually winds up generating the final work,” she said. “I love this idea of watching the real work emerge as [the audience members] actually listen to the audio guide, and start milling and seething and generating emotional content throughout the fair.”

The Emdash Award, which last year replaced the Cartier Award, is dedicated to non-UK based artists who graduated less than five years ago. It provides up to £10,000 of production costs for the proposed project, a £1,000 artist fee, and a three-month residency at Gasworks in South London.