Morag keil series#

Objects have been cobbled together wires spill everywhere and a reflection of the phone recording the image can be seen on every surface. Combining painting, sculpture, sound, photography and video, her work is a collage of the contemporary landscape that has been created with a seemingly disaffected shrug: lo-fi aesthetics interspersed with excerpts from video games and advertising. Keil seems to suggest that what we can do is riff and vamp on the surfaces that hem us in. Courtesy: the artist and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London photograph: Mark Blower Morag Keil, ‘Moarg Kiel’, 2019, exhibition view, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. We’re trapped, Keil constantly asserts: so what are we going to do about it?

Morag keil series#

This virtual maze provided the blueprint for Keil’s solo exhibitions last year at Jenny’s in Los Angeles and Project Native Informant in London, in which visitors had to navigate a series of closed doors: some could be opened, leading to small rooms with yet more doors most were locked. In her video Passive Aggressive 2 (2017), a child races around a slick, middle-class kitchen, opening soft-close drawers and cabinets to reveal the hidden mess behind the shiny veneer later in the video, we cut from a woman working on a laptop in a cramped bedroom to a digital animation of a green room with doors on each wall – we go through one to find an identical room, then another and another and another. The purgatorial atmosphere of the video, as part of London-based Scottish artist Morag Keil’s (deliberately misspelled) installation Moarg Kiel (2019), is a familiar one from her work: exploring small corridors filled with dead ends and doors to nowhere. It’s as if we’re trapped in a mall, confined to the women’s department, doomed perpetually to browse the overpriced, middlebrow fashion. The footage slows and then jumps to the perspective from her phone and off we go again, through a maze of fashion, until her lens happens upon another camera-toting drifter – and so on and on. Then, from around the checkout desk, a woman in a mid-length green jacket appears, walking as if in a trance, holding a phone in front of herself at head height. We return to wander the Burberry and Karen Millen sections, yet again. With shaky, hand-held footage, the video takes us down aisles lined with poised mannequins and brightly lit clusters of sweaters and hats, turning back whenever a door or escalator is encountered: leaving, it seems, isn’t an option. We drift and bob through an empty clothing store, circling seemingly endless racks of fake-fur coats, trim grey jackets and velour scarves.