Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter captures and explores human relationships, particularly the performed behaviours and interactions of everyday life. Working with narrative, Cytter plays with humorous, absurd, and deconstructed dialogues, which at times mix fictitious situations with real-life. Typically her work has manifested into video and staged performances where conventions from literature, television, film, and theatre are all used and then unravelled, creating very particular, and unconventional, narrative structures. Reality and artifice are continually blurred, due to the fact that she uses her own life, and that of her friends, as a primary source of inspiration.

Museum of Photography (MOP) is a large archive of Polaroid photographs that document Cytter's life as she travelled from Berlin, to London, to the USA, and Israel from 2012 to 2013. Taken with her 1200i and One step 600 Polaroid Camera, the photographs are carefully categorised by geography and chronology and then arranged into sub-sections, titled A, B, C and D and so on, via their aesthetic. Images of friends, colleagues, curators she has encountered, museums she has worked in, landscapes she is passing through, and her own performances are all featured. Although lacking in a script, MOP has a similar dependence on image structure to her previous works, where she visually constructs a disrupted, and hence confused narrative. A form of self-portrait, acting as a visual diary, Cytter also bestows another type of performed structure on to the project by referencing 'Museum' in the series' title.

For Vengeance, a seven-part video narrative epic, Cytter takes her own currently changing life situation as inspiration. Having recently moved to New York, Cytter adopted the US TV-platform of the "daily soap" as a structural format to processes classic themes of drama in personal relationships: love, envy, betrayal, and vengeance. Cytter's characters perform exaggerated scenes of soap genre clichés, such as cheating on partners, and professions of love. Unlike her older series of video works and their intimate settings, the scenes in Vengeance were filmed at 15 different places around Staten Island and New Jersey, including restaurants, hotels, parks, apartments, and streets. A total of 50 actors, most of them professionals, fulfill their social functions with blank faces. They provide a projection space for the beliefs and stereotypes of each viewer.

Keren Cytter (b. 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions and performances of Cytter's work include Vociferous: Keren Cytter with David Aird, Keira Fox and Charlie Feinstein, Wysing Arts Centre, and ICA, London (2013); Show Real Drama, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2013); A Theatre Cycle, NOMAS Foundation at Teatro Valle Occupato, Rome (2013); Show Real Drama, Tate Modern Oil Tanks, London (2012); Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); Project Series: Keren Cytter, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009). In 2006 Cytter was awarded the prestigious Bâloise Art Prize at Art Basel.