Overview
Keren Cytter tells stories – absurd, funny, and mostly abysmal. Through experimental forms of narrative and perception, Cytter’s work explores social alienation, meaning and representation of language, and the function of the individual in cultural systems. She is primarily a filmmaker, but her work also includes performances, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, children’s books, and interdisciplinary festivals. With the often cyclical logic of her works, Cytter deconstructs classical narrative patterns as well as conventional language conventions and interpretive sovereignties. Her montages of memories, dream images, and conceits, reminiscent of amateur videos, create multilayered, poetic compositions of a mostly irritatingly grotesque quality.
Hot Lava Night presents over twenty drawings and two new video works by the artist. In the eponymous short film Hot Lava Night (2023), radio reports depict the extent of a fictitious catastrophic flood that leads to a global crisis of unimagined proportions. While showing people’s capacity for compassion and unity, the film depicts the blossoming of a young romance that begins in New York and ends at a coastal refuge. A place where there are no signs of devastation and the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred.
In her 90-minute film White Elephant (2023), Cytter follows the relationships between a woman and a drone, a sex addict, a confused actor and a neighbour mourning her dead father. The protagonists are connected to each other through various contexts and constellations. Cytter stages a complex web of interpersonal relationships between loss, love, grief, values, dependencies and longings.
The artist’s drawings also revolve around social alienation, the function and representation of language and the significance of the individual in society. In addition to her own works on paper, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is showing Cytter’s artistically designed script excerpts and storyboards for her films as well as drawings that appear in White Elephant.
