Morag Keil

Morag Keil works across media, including painting, installation, video and digital formats. In her work, she explores the complex interrelationships between technology, surveillance, and labor, and reflects on how our everyday reality is shaped and structured by (digital) capitalist systems, particularly with regard to their impact on subjectivity and the realities of daily life. In doing so, she addresses physicality, mental states, intimacy, and desire within the context of contemporary media and consumer cultures. Her sculptures and environments frequently adopt a deliberate low-fi aesthetic and evoke a sense of provisionality or incompleteness, using everyday objects and simple materials to subvert the smooth surfaces of digital imagery. From kinetic sculpture and vintage cybernetics of the 1960s, to feminist strains within computer art, and more contemporary developments in installation, Keil’s work references the ways in which artists have metabolized new media in different periods.

In Mr Magic, Keil takes a domestic scene from television and transforms it into a constellation that is both familiar and unsettlingly shifted. The installation feels equally domestic and theatrical, organized around a life-size mannequin, a microwave, and a handheld camera whose image appears on a screen. The figure itself oscillates between human presence and an empty shell, causing the familiar to tip into something foreign, almost uncanny. In viewing the work, the boundary blurs between the components that make up the piece and the viewer, who perceives the scene but simultaneously becomes part of it.

This intertwining of perception and participation creates an ambivalence between the interior and the exterior, which cannot be understood merely as a spatial or situational shift, but proves to be a structural aspect of perception itself. Viewers are thus no longer clearly separated from the scene, but are integrated into a structure in which observation and participation become indistinguishable, as perception itself organizes itself through continuous feedback loops. Mr Magic can thus be read as an arrangement in which introspection becomes effective as a process that brings forth not only what is seen but also the conditions of seeing. Thus, the supposedly familiar and private situation of watching television tips into a disorienting loop in which subject and system mutually produce and stabilize one another without ever fully coinciding.

Mr. Magic, 2024
Mannequin, microwave, table, armchair, cameras, screens, phone and apple
Variable dimensions
Courtesy Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin