AARHUS.- Kunsthal Aarhus is presenting Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's Pixel-Collage and an exhibition by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans, who transformed the basement of the Kunsthal into a spacious installation.

Thomas Hirschhorn – Pixel-Collage
Swiss artist, Thomas Hirschhorn, works with installations, collages and social happenings in public spaces. Hirschhorn is concerned with politics and culture, and there is always a strong political message embedded in his works. He uses commom materiales such as cardboard, foil, duct tape, recycled cans and plastic wrap.

At Kunsthal Aarhus, Hirschhorn presents a new series of Pixel-Collages. In these works the artist integrates the growing phenomena of facelessness in pictures reproduced in the media.

'Pixelation' has become increasingly used in today's newspapers and magazines to mask identity, face, sexuality and censor. Sometimes to mask the horror of damaged and destroyed bodies in the aftermath of war and terror.

Hirschhorn appropriates these images and enlarges them to the scale of advertising billboards. In many of these, the horrific is left uncovered and only portions of the collage with fashion images are pixelated. Hirschhorn wants to use pixels as an instrument to link the unspeakable with an abstract version of present realities, and link the hidden with the known.

Cécile B. Evans – What the Heart Wants
Kunsthal Aarhus is also presenting a solo exhibition of the Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans. What the Heart Wants is her first exhibition in Denmark. For the video installation, which premiered at the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016, Evans transformed the basement of Kunsthal Aarhus into a spacious installation.

Unravelling the value of emotion in contemporary society, Cécile B. Evans' work explores the person-to-machine exchanges that have come to define the contemporary human condition. Her video installation What the Heart Wants examines what it could mean to be "a person" in the future and how machines (technical, social, and political) shape how we are "human." HYPER, a powerful new system and the narrator of the video, has achieved this ultimate goal of personhood. 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.

The video installation What the Heart Wants was commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale, and was co-produced by Kunsthal Aarhus, the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem and Kunsthalle Winterthur.