Morag Keil

Labzone, RDV/tutorials (studio/practice)

Morag Keil is a Scottish artist living and working in London, exhibiting internationally, both collaboratively and as a solo artist.
A unifying current in her lo-fi aesthetic is the concern to reflect life as lived: her recent show at the ICA in London offered an insightful consideration of how a world increasingly mediated by technology and digital communication is impacting our day-to-day existence. Within many of the works in the exhibition, Keil appropriates and re-presents branding strategies to investigate and expose pervasive techniques for influencing consumerist desire. She also foregrounds and subverts the visual and aural strategies of computer gaming or commercial environments used to manipulate behaviour in ways premised on cliched notions of gender performance.

It’s all a bit dwarfed by the space, shy and racked with doubt, and maybe it’s not immediately striking, but it’s almost painfully familiar. Keil’s work is a battle between our public and private selves, between looking at gossip sites and literary journals, between succeeding and failing, between capitalism and independence. It’s not necessarily hugely impressive, but it’s very, very real, and sometimes that’s enough. (Time Out on Moarg Keil, 2019)

Morag Keil’s recent solo exhibitions include Moarg Keil (ICA London 2019) Here We Go Again (Project Native Informant, London 2018), Controllers (Jenny's Los Angeles 2018). She is part of recent group exhibitions in Dusseldorf (Masculinities, 2019), Delme (Digital Gothic, 2019), and Fribourg (Discoteca Analitica, 2019), and has collaborated with Georgie Nettell on shows in Raven Row London, Reena Spaulings New York, and Jupiter Woods, Vienna.