Céline Condorelli

Céline Condorelli (IT, FR, UK) is a London-based artist, whose work combines a number of approaches from developing structures for ‘supporting’ (the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities) to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites.

A recent selection of exhibitions and projects include:
In the Light of What We Know, Remai Modern, CA (2024); Radical Playgrounds, Gropius Bau, Germany (2024); Pentimenti (The Corrections), National Gallery, UK (2023), After Work, Talbot Rice Gallery & South London Gallery, UK (2022); Our Silver City 2094, Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2022); Dos años de vacaciones, TEA, Tenerife, Spain (2021); Deux ans de vacances, FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France (2020); Ground Control, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2020); Every Step in the Right Direction, Singapore Biennial (2019); Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara, Romania (2019); Céline Condorelli, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2019); Host / Vært, Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2019); Zanzibar (commissioned sculpture), King’s Cross Projects, London, UK (2019); Geometries, Locus Athens, Greece (2018); Anren Biennale, Chengdu, China (2017); Céline Condorelli, Epilogue, P!, New York, USA (2017); Wall to Wall, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany (2017); Proposals for a Qualitative Society (Spinning), Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands (2017); Corps à Corps, IMA Brisbane, Australia (2017); Conversation Pieces, MASP, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2016); Sidney Biennial, Australia (2016).

Condorelli was one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, and the 2023 National Gallery Artist in Residence. She made Support Structures, published by Sternberg Press (2009/2014), and monographs include bau bau. Pirelli HangarBicocca. Milan, (2017), After Work, Edinburgh University Press (2022), Céline Condorelli, National Gallery (2023), Two Years Vacation, Archive Books (2024). Condorelli is Professor at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), Germany.

Integrations (Sidi El Mokhtar)

The ongoing project Integrations was shaped by taking a historical pedagogical model as a working methodology with manifestations across different registers: as a way to research, as exhibition and teaching formats, and as a labour structure.

In 2020 I decided to become a student of the Casablanca Art School (1962–1974) —an anti-colonial pedagogical experiment that refused the hierarchy between art and craft, recentred non-European visual thinking, and understood abstraction as a language for collective and political action. Slowly forming fragments from the school’s legacy into a curriculum lead to periods of intermittent travel across Morocco, spent studying abstract visual language through drawing, photographing, and describing Amazigh carpets. This material structured a seminar at HfG Karlsruhe, where students were invited to take part as students of the 1962–1974 school.

Abstraction was studied as women’s labour, through ancestral practices of experimentation across the Afro-Mediterranean world, and not, as historically taught in art schools, as originating from the great, often white and male, artists of the 20th century. This studying produced The Source: a visual lexicon of recurring forms and colours, at once documentary and instructive, fragments of which came to function as open scores for a women’s weavers collective in Sidi El Mokhtar, about 100km from Marrakesh. The resulting carpets have been exhibited in institutions in Casablanca and beyond, and profits from their sale are returned to the cooperative to improve the working conditions that made them possible in the first place, in the form of a circular economy, and small, historical correction.