In Memory of Ceal Floyer

In the curatorial text accompanying Ceal Floyer’s solo exhibition at Museion in 2014, the exhibition’s curator and then director of the museum, Letizia Ragaglia, wrote: “The fourth floor of the institution, where solo exhibitions usually take place, is the brightest and offers the most spectacular view.” Referring to the space dedicated to Floyer’s exhibition, she continued: “Many artists have explored, in their installations, the exchange between interior and exterior, emphasizing transparency toward the city; others have deliberately excluded the urban context; still others have addressed the inaccessibility of the architectural white cube by rendering certain areas of the exhibition space unusable. No one, however, had yet attempted to artificially increase the light itself. And certainly not by means of a giant light bulb…”

This text introduces the world of Ceal Floyer, a world in which an unconventional reading of reality and art gently unsettles the viewer’s perception, through wordplay as much as through an invitation to find pleasure in not immediately identifying things, but in allowing oneself to dwell within their multiple possible meanings. Overhead Projector, to which Ragaglia refers, entered Museion’s collection following the exhibition. The work consists of an enlarged image of a light bulb resting on the surface of an overhead projector. Its title is simply the name of the technical device itself. As transparent as Floyer’s artistic language may be, it is equally clear that the projected, oversized light bulb does not actually increase the illumination of the exhibition space; instead, it turns light itself into the subject of reflection.

Born in 1968 in Karachi, Pakistan, to a British family and raised in England, Ceal Floyer was trained in London and emerged in the 1990s as a key figure in the British conceptual art scene. She received the Nam June Paik Award in 2009 and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in Berlin in 2007. Her artistic research consistently focused on everyday objects and the ways in which their meanings are constructed. With a distinctive ability to combine irony, conceptual rigor, and minimalism, Floyer worked in the unexpected interstices of reality.

Just a few days after her passing on 11 December 2025, Museion wishes to remember Ceal Floyer and, in doing so, to renew the enduring invitation articulated throughout her work: to remain attentive to things, in order to cultivate a deeper awareness of “how to be” in the world.