Plughole, 2017
video-projection (colour, sound)
3 min 53 sec
Edition of 3
In Ceal Floyer’s Plughole, a static camera is obsessively focused on a six-hole bathroom sink drain. The video depicts a stream of water being redirected to fill each hole perfectly, one by one, using the faucet’s flow. The drain’s function as a receptacle for water becomes a kind of short-circuit, as water itself becomes the material that plugs its own pathway. By subjecting familiar objects to simple yet profound functional inversions that become semiotic inversions too, Floyer playfully reroutes conventional patterns of perception. Her works serve as productive irritations that use their inherent logic to prompt an open process of seeing and thinking.
Ceal Floyer (b. 1968, Karachi; lives and works Berlin) creates ultra-minimal multimedia works that build upon the history and language of conceptual art. By activating entirely logical, yet overlooked, associations from familiar objects, Floyer’s uncanny gestures resuscitate our experience of the everyday. Slight alterations to found objects (a hairbrush, the sign for an emergency exit, or the projection of an image of a nail, for instance) create often surprising interventions that heighten the awareness of our surroundings.
Floyer studied at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2006, she was nominated for the Nam June Paik Award and in 2007, for the Berlin-based Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst. She has recently held solo exhibitions at Base Progetti per l‘Arte, Florence (2022-23); goeben Berlin (2021); Y8 Kunstraum, Hamburg (2020); Kunsthal 44Møen, Askeby (2019); University of Michigan Museum of Art (2019); and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2018–2019). Floyer participated in Manifesta 11 (2016), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), and in the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Her work has been acquired by the following collections: Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Sammlung Zeitgenössische Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; Denver Art Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Presented by Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, Seoul).