Morag Keil,

Lifes

13 February 2022 — 08 May 2022

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Lifes is conceived as a durational sequence that unfolds over time. A cycle of audio, video, and live performance repeats at the top of each hour, but there is no singular or optimal way to experience the exhibition. Intermittent dance and music performances interrupt the implied stability of the schedule. The whole assembly becomes an orchestrated cacophony of disparate parts and competing interests. Any moments of dissonance that arise within the container of the exhibition reflect the lived conditions and working methods of artists across disciplines.

Lifes began as a consideration of the promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary artmaking and the legacy of the so-called total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk)—a concept originating in the 19th century that proposes a synthesis of poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic arts. The notion of interdisciplinarity has since become a mainstay of contemporary art museums and other presenting organizations. Rather than assume that cross-disciplinary collaboration is a recipe for innovation and creative enrichment, Lifes acknowledges the inherent incompatibilities at play between traditional artistic disciplines and within the spaces of art’s display.

The genesis of Lifes was the written contributions of four writers: philosopher and author Fahim Amir, writer and director Asher Hartman, poet and visual artist Rindon Johnson, and author and essayist Adania Shibli. Spanning literary genres and styles, their texts question who or what has the right to agency, the incompatibility between physical bodies and the spaces that govern them, and the aesthetic misgivings between sensory experiences. The texts—available in full in the exhibition publication—permeate the galleries of the museum as fragments, references, and utterances that test the limits of audibility and legibility.

These writings served as catalysts for conversations with more collaborators—visual artists, choreographers, composers, musicians, vocalists, and other writers—who were invited to engage in a shared dialogue and produce new works for the exhibition. Many contributors suggested the participation of others while maintaining a dialogue with the exhibition’s curator, who managed the dynamic interplay of relations. Overlapping themes emerged, including the translation and mediation of language and the idea of the audience as a material substance inseparable from public exhibitions. Given that the voice is a readymade carrier for words, many conversations skewed toward undermining the reliability of oration and considering what a voice in ruin might sound and feel like.

Additional contributors were invited to address the overall institutional infrastructure that imparts itself onto one’s encounter with art in the museum context. In addition to these commissions, the exhibition incorporates preexisting artworks, dating from 1993 to 2016, by L. Frank, Charles Gaines, Piero Gilardi, and Rosemarie Trockel. These four artists offer a generational framework that situates the other works in the exhibition within art histories of the recent past.

Lifes is organized by Aram Moshayedi, Robert Soros Senior Curator, with Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant.

CONTRIBUTORS

Fahim Amir, Holland Andrews, Elke Auer, Gregory Barnett, Kevin Beasley, Nina Beier, Dwayne Brown, Dora Budor, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, Varinia Canto Vila, Elaine Carberry, Sophia Cleary, Loren Davis Fisher, Kaydence De Mere, L. Frank, Khalia J. Frazier, Kaye Freeman, Shannon Funchess, Charles Gaines, Ley Gambucci, Abriel Gardner, Piero Gilardi, Jules Gimbrone, Andre Gurewich, Paul Hamilton, Asher Hartman, IONE, Shannon Jackson, Cooper Jacoby, Narissa Johnson, Rindon Johnson, Darrell Jones, Morag Keil, Justin F. Kennedy, Jessika Kenney, Hanieh Khatibi, Bob Kil, Kite, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ralph Lemon, Adam Linder, Tiffany Malakooti, Alucard Mendoza McHaney, Olivia Mole, Roderick Murray, Mariama Noguera-Devers, Nima Nourizadeh, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pauline Oliveros, Jasmine Orpilla, Aubrey Plaza, Senyawa, Adania Shibli, Micah Silver, Samita Sinha, Meg Stuart, Greg Tate, Mike Taylor, Teake, Rosemarie Trockel, Andros Zins-Browne.

Morag Keil

Morag Keil’s practice can be described as ouroboric: self-referring, self-erasing, self- consuming, regurgitating. Keil’s installations have the bald efficiency of something bargain-bucket but workable. The clunky papier-mâché houses downtrodden with office heels or low-fi glitchy videos actualises her reflection of contemporaneity’s squashing and conditioning of subjectivity, as well as the interlocking of production and pleasure. Beneath the watermark of professionalism and propriety lies a cesspit of personal contradictions and anxiety-trimmed mediations.

Through a wide variety of mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video, as well as collaborative projects with artists such as Georgie Nettell, Keil’s work often relieve the aestheticising cliché of post-financial crash and millennial precarity. In her gallery exhibition, Here We Go Again, the artist simulated in three dimensions an out of date video game mocking home automation: doors with peepholes open up to doors, walls painted in soft pink and green screen, and televisions playing a lush forest CGI animation from a BBC One ident, which then cut to a blue circle that wobbled as a voice-over asked in the half- droning tones of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. Behind Keil’s work is the demand to know why we live like this and the impulse to tear it all down; but, until that happens, we wander.

Keil uses what she describes as ‘limp gestures’ to appeal to the impoverishment of self-image, the abduction of the real, and the hapless quality of screen-based experience that trades the spontaneous for the scripted. Yet, more than simply touting mainstream commentary about the evils of technology, media illiteracy, or idle consumption, Keil’s work engages with contemporary reality in terms of language and form. It is neither direct critique nor personal plight against the contemporary condition. Rather, Keil drives us towards reflections on subjectivity, preconceived interpretations and misconceptions.

Her celebrated solo institutional exhibition, Moarg Keil, presented a survey of a decade’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 2019. Keil recently presented her third solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Free Like Only Animals Can Be.

Her works have presented works at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Fondazione Prada, Venice; Swiss Institute, New York; Yale Union, Portland; LUMA Westbau, Zurich, amongst numerous other institutions.

Keil’s paintings and sculptures can be found in the public collections of the British Council, London, FENIX Museum, Rotterdam and Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris.

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