Keren Cytter

2005 Frankfurter Kunstverein EXHIBITION

Jan 19 to Feb 20, 2005

The Frankfurter Kunstverein presents the first major solo-exhibition of the young Israeli artist Keren Cytter (born 1977), who lives and works in Amsterdam. The presentation will include ten video works dating from the last four years, produced in Israel and Holland.

Cytters short films mingle documentary, fictional forms, and comments on the filmic form itself. They are experiments in ways of creating multi-layered forms of story telling that deconstruct and transpose narrative conventions and clichés, to make the films balance on a line between the funny, the grotesque and the tragic.

Most of the films are built upon a simple narrative structure – a dialogue, an event, etc., mostly written around documentary material, such as her or her friends’ lives. The result is a synthesis of fact and fiction, of the authentic story-skeleton with various quotes and clichés from popular culture, film, pop songs, trash literature, played out in dramatic forms from melodrama to documentary – sometimes at the same time.

The filmic layers are connoted in various ways. The film The Milkman, for example, is split up into different layers of dialogues conducted in two languages. A young man wants to commit suicide, and has an internal dialogue with important persons from his life, his mother, his ex-girlfriend, etc. Parallel to this is a narrative, which deals with the filmic form itself, where the making of the film is discussed, and the camera as an object becomes a part of the storyline.

In Cytters works a new way of telling the story is set up, where the identities of the characters and of the story become muddled. The artificiality of the language and the style, overloaded with clichés and conventions, blended with the apparently documentary, “home-video” style, make some of the films into grotesques on the human relations and feelings portrayed, (friendship, love, sex) and of the characters.

Keren Cytter, Disillusioned Love II

Artist: Keren Cytter
(born 1977, in Tel Aviv) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions: MUMOK, Vienna; and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (both 2007); Artis, Den Bosch; I was the good and he was the bad and the ugly, Kunst Werke, Berlin; The Victim, ART Basel Statements (all 2006); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (both 2005); My brain is in the wall, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2004). Recent group exhibitions : House Trip, Art Forum Berlin; Talking Pictures, Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus, Düsseldorf; Biennale de Lyon; 2nd Moscow Biennale; I could be you, de Appel, Amsterdam; Depiction, perversion, repulsion, obsession, subversion, Witte de With, Rotterdam (all 2007); All Hawaii Entrees/Lunar Reggae, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006). Cytter studied at de Ateliers, Amsterdam (2002-2004) following her studies at the Avni institute in Tel Aviv (1997-1998).

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