Ceal Floyer Warning Birds, 2002

"Countless stickers in the form of the black silhouettes of birds – like those familiar from the facades of public buildings – have been installed on the large windows. They feature the shadow-like contours of buzzards and are intended to protect real birds by scaring them off, thus preventing them from flying into panes of clear glass. In contrast to the manner in which they are normally installed, with the stickers placed only sporadically, the ‘buzzards’ in Ceal Floyer’s 2002 work Warning Birds are placed directly next to one another. The view through the panes of glass is thus restricted to such a degree that the windows are hardly able to fulfil their actual function. The specific arrangement of the birds causes them to display an almost ornamental character, which occasionally draws attention away from the fact that they forcefully recall memories of the well-known attack scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds. By altering familiar parameters Floyer achieves a fundamental semantic shift insofar as the work permits a wide range of associations, despite the fact that it displays nothing but ‘warning birds’ – as the title implies."

– Moritz Wesseler. "Ceal Floyer at the Kölnischer Kunstverein", in: Ceal Floyer, (exh.cat), Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2013. p.10.