Artists

Morag Keil

Press release

Galerie Oskar Weiss is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition Morag Keil What If You Lost Everything, opening on Friday, November 6, at the gallery in Zurich. What if you lost everything If objects – artworks among them – are a store of history, experience, and sometimes wealth, all these things eventually get lost or rewritten, as property relations are eroded by the passing of time. What if you lost everything. What if this is a threat. Not the slow burn of generations but calamity. Your wealth, your experience, your image, seized, looted, expropriated, defaced. Canvases are locked together, front facing front, concealing their distinction and specialisation. The bolts are tough but frantic in their aggregation, like documents quickly bundled with a rubber band or fastened with a staple, a stopgap measure to gather and secure. Substitutes are another form of stopgap, another kind of security, and in this exhibition a series of interchanges insure and ensure presence. There is a video of Morag making her phone canvas works, which always have Generation in the title. Generation is both a collective designation for a cohort of people or commodities born at the same time, but also a word which means to make, create, produce. Making is the subject of the birds eye view instructional video, where we see Morag’s hands assembling a Generation from stretched canvas, phone, bolts, coloured fabric. Enter the Morag-hologram stage right, alternately gesturing and silently mouthing words to us – a variation on the artists piece-to-camera genre – and fiddling with her clothes, tucking her top into trousers, sometimes with elbow bent and resting on the tasteful box monitor so beloved in elegant exhibitions of an earlier generation of now dead Conceptualists. This is not a real hologram, but seeks to work like one, situating the artist as a character, a persona, which re-runs in another room on a big flat screen TV. A new generation TV. Re-runs are generational too, binding people together in a static, comforting repetition of where you were when you first watched that show. The Simpsons is always after school and it is always the episode where Homer inadvertently overrides nuclear meltdown. The re-run “usurps reality”, as in Douglas Crimp’s assessment of why the Pictures generation of artists investigated how images structured, and increasingly seemed to produce ourselves and our reality. But Morag’s re-runs misapprehend these notions, because there is always a tampering, and re-opening, a return marked by disobedience to the original, to posession. By this I mean she walks back into her life and her generation. Larne Abse Gogarty