Morag Keil was born in Edinburgh in 1985; she studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.

Keil works in diverse mediums, including installation, painting and film, and her practice is shaped by a performative engagement with questions of identity and authenticity.  Found jpegs become the subject of spurious ‘self’ portraits; multiple voices, found and filmed recordings are spliced in sound and video installations - there is no easy division between the digital and the analogue self.

Morag Keil’s solo exhibitions include ‘Potpourri’, Cubitt, London; ‘Palais de Token’, Neue Alte Bruecke, Frankfurt (2013); ‘Civil War’, Outpost, Norwich (2012); ‘Virginia Ham’, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen; ‘Moarg Kiel’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ‘Public Hanging’, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (all 2011). In 2010, Keil received the Prix Lafayette at FIAC in Paris. 

Glossary

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Video

    Images recorded on videotape or on optical disc to be viewed on television screens, or projected onto screens. The medium through which these images are recorded and displayed.