Peel

source: museomadreit

There’s a fine line between making sense of the world and making nonsense of it .»
(Ceal Floyer. 2006)
«Sometimes I am just an interpreter of reality and imagination, of what I hear and what I see, of the past life of an object. Which is ready to reveal itself.»
(Ceal Floyer, 2008)
She was born on April 18th 1968 in Karachi, Pakistan, of an Austrian mother and a Canadian father. In 1991 she moved to London to attend the BA Goldsmiths College, where she graduated in 1994. In 1992 she began exhibiting and in 1995 she held her first solo show at the Science Museum of London. Through a sophisticated use of strategies borrowed from the history of modern art, such as Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, Floyer creates works in which the title plays a key role, as it explains both the subject and the process that led to them. An example of this is Light Switch, (1992-99, Tate Collection, London), which consists in the image on a light switch projected in scale from a 35mm slide on the wall, just where you would expect to find it. Being focused on the dialectical tension between literal and mundane, significance and signifier, illusionism and double-takes, her practice aims at drawing attention to everyday objects and situations that are generally neglected, recreating them through simple, almost naïve, video or audio technologies, as testified by Carousel (1996, Tate Collection, London): a vinyl record playing the sound of a slide carousel. One of the most interesting British artists of the new generation, in 1995 she was invited to the General Release: Young British Artists at Scuola di San Pasquale exhibition, organized in the framework of the XLVI Venice Biennial, and to the British Art Show 4 (1995-96). After that she took part in travelling exhibitions such as Pictura Britannica: Art from Britain in 1997 and Dimensions variable in 1997-99 (Unfinished, 1995, video-projection, British Council collection, London). In 1997 she was asked to exhibit at the Herzliya Museum of Art in Tel Aviv and held solo shows at the Lisson Gallery of London and at the Galleria Primo Piano di Maria Colao in Rome (1997), both connected to the Conceptualist and Minimalist traditions. Floyer’s affinity with this tradition is testified by her presence to the Minimalismus exhibition, organized in 1998 by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, where the artist moved in 1997 after being granted a scholarship by the Philip Morris Foundation and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien of Berlin, which hosted a solo show of the artist in 1998. The frequent use of everyday objects brought the artist to participate to group shows whose theme was the use of icons and elements of everyday life in contemporary art, such as Life/Live, held in 1996 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Centro Cultural de Belem of Lisbon; Material Culture: the object in British art in the 80’s and 90’s at the Hayward Gallery of London (1997); Every Day, at the XI Sydney Biennial (1998). The conceptual nature of Floyer’s aesthetics is well documented by her solo show held in 2001 at the Peer, Shoreditch Town Hall of London, whose title, Massive Reduction, plays on words of opposite meaning, expressing the sense of humour in her installations, informed by her taste for the absurd, double-takes and shifting points of view. At the Matrix 192 solo show held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive of Berkeley, the artist exhibited 37’ 4” (2001): an elastic that modifies the length of the wall to which it is attached, prompting a reflection on language and perception, space and time. This is particularly important, both because Floyer’s works need a certain time to be interpreted and understood, and for the performative character of her performances, notably the Nail Biting Performance. The artist made this performance in 2001 at the Ikon Gallery of Birmingham and then repeated it at the Birmingham Symphony Hall immediately prior to the beginning of a concert. The performance consisted in Floyer tapping her fingers on the microphone for 5 minutes, in a typical gesture of nervousness, creating a tense atmosphere on the stage – thus breathing fresh life into the experimental and interdisciplinary lesson of Fluxus. Hence her participation to exhibitions focused on this theme: Making Time: Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video & Film, hosted at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida (2000), Tempo and Loop: Back to the Beginning, respectively organized by the Museum of Modern Art of New York and the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati (2002). The site-specific character of her installations, which was merely considered from a spatial point of view in I luoghi ritrovati (La Grancia Civic Centre for Contemporary Art, Serre di Rapolano, 1997), Genius Loci (Kunsthalle, Bern, 1998), was now developed and perceived in a broader and subtler sense, as it is confirmed by her participation to the group show Liminal Space held at the Center for Curatorial Studies of the Bard College of New York (2002). Another feature of Floyer’s poetics is the relationship between reality and fiction, which is the theme of two different exhibitions: Real/Life: New British Art 1998-1999 (Japan, 1998) and Mirror’s Edge, curated by Okwui Enwezor (Umea, Sweden, and Turin, 1999-2001). After winning the prestigious The Paul Hamlyn Award in 2002, in 2005 Floyer got the Bremerhaven-Stipendium, a scholarship granted by the Kunst und Nutzen association of Bremerhaven (Germany). The following year she participated to the Nam June Paik Award 2006 of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne, but it is in 2007 that she established herself as an international artist, winning the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art with the work Scale (2007, Lisson Gallery, London): a stairway made up of 24 wall-mounted speakers, a computer and 12 stereo amplifiers reproducing the sound of steps going up or down the stairs. In its formal simplicity the work engages the space in many ways: physically, auditively and allegorically. This imaginative use of video and sound technology explains Floyer’s participation to groups shows such as Slide Show, held at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2005); Light LAB: Alltägliche Kurzschlüsse, organized by the Museion of Bolzano (2005); Artificial Light at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts of Richmond (2006); Silenzio: una mostra da ascoltare at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo of Turin (2007). At the group shows Beautiful so Difficult hosted in 2005 by the Fondazione Stelline of Milan and Landscape (Distance and Removal) organized in 2007 by the Württembergischer Kunstverein of Stuttgart, Floyer exhibited Warning Birds (2002): an installation that consists of a huge number of adhesive bird-shaped silhouettes attached on glass windows. With this work, which suspends the reassuring distance between internal and external space, civilization and nature, Floyer starts exploring the relationship between nature and artifice, a favourite theme of the Arte Povera movement. The focus on contrasting aspects of nature and culture, ecology and profit is the theme of the 2008 Frieze Project curated by Neville Wakefield and Floyer is one of the 11 artists that were asked to execute site-specific works for the special programme of the Frieze Foundation, where she exhibited Stable (2007): beer mats folded and placed under the legs of a table to stabilize it.
Currently Ceal Floyer lives in Berlin.
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source: ratsdevilletypepad

La clarté de pensée de Ceal Floyer se manifeste dans des présentations d’une concision élégante. Un regard engagé et actif est habituellement requis, et toujours récompensé, pour apprécier les amalgames minimalistes-conceptuels de l’artiste. Son travail, dont les résonances finement philosophiques persistent bien après qu’on l’a côtoyé, met souvent en lumière des objets et des situations négligés du quotidien. Floyer a une conception très réflexive de son art : elle ne s’intéresse pas nécessairement à ce qui serait situé à l’extérieur de l’oeuvre, mais plutôt au contexte et aux conditions de sa production et de sa mise en forme.

Ce qui peut sembler, au départ, un exercice de réduction prend de l’ampleur au fil de la contemplation. Floyer a cette étrange capacité de dénicher et d’activer des associations totalement logiques, mais méconnues, dans des objets ternes et inertes. Puisant dans la tradition du ready-made et de l’art conceptuel, elle crée une démesure intéressante entre la forme presque absente prise par l’œuvre et les idées et remaniements nombreux qu’elle génère.