Keren Cytter was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1977. She lives and works in New York, U.S.A.



Keren Cytter is a video artist, filmmaker and writer. With her narrative yet radically experimental videos, made quickly and with few resources, which she also writes, films and edits herself, Keren Cytter is now recognized as an artist who has radically innovated and expanded the language of the medium. She bases her predominantly short video works on simple plots, usually well-known or even clichéd personal interactions, around which she writes a script that presents the plot in an entirely deconstructed manner. During the editing, the story is further taken apart (in terms of both audio and video) and pieced back together to form an autonomous video work that breaks with all possible narrative conventions; spoken word, voice-over, subtitles, roles, actors and text are used in a non-hierarchical and asynchronous manner. She further borrows styles, formats, plots, and story elements from both cinema and media culture, and television series. Despite all these conceptual and technical innovations, her work remains readable as a great audio-visual document on our social neuroses and visual culture.

For this first solo show at Deweer Gallery, entitled ‘Tutorial’, Keren Cytter brings together four recent video works, giving the visitor an insight into various aspects of her film practice, and two series of drawings. In ‘Video Art Manual’, a work from 2011 that takes a somewhat special place in her oeuvre, Cytter focuses on how contemporary video art could or should be made. The video reads as an ironical, misleading manual, while ambiguously revealing some artistic preoccupations Cytter deals with in her other video works. In ‘Der Spiegel’ from 2007, Cytter makes use of a ‘choir’ technique – which originated in ancient Greek drama and consists of a live, on-stage comment on the action by a group of choir members - to enhance the narrative potential of a short story and to experiment with the traditional parameters of filmed story-telling. In ‘Der Spiegel’, the choir revolts and takes control over the action, overruling the dominant role of the main actors. For ‘Untitled’, filmed in front of live audiences at the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin and produced for the 2009 Venice Biennial, Cytter was inspired by Cassavetes’ film ‘Opening Night’. She worked with both professional and amateur actors and used several cameras close to the action, causing the viewer to feel submersed in the psychological interactions of the actors. ‘The Hottest Day of the Year’, made in 2010, refers to the tradition of the romantic anthropological documentary. The work of directors Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha was influential here: in their documentaries, both directors were concerned with colonialism, and intermingled real and fictional elements with philosophical and sociological comments. The drawings in ‘Tutorial’ are a series of preparatory sketches for ‘Untitled’ and a series of four new drawings.

Keren Cytter's videos have been shown in solo shows at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Kunsthalle Zurich (both 2005), at Kunst-Werke Berlin (2006), MUMOK Vienna (2007), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), Tate Moderne Turbine Hall (“History in the making” with D.I.E. Now, 2009), at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (both 2010), at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (“Avalanche”, 2011) and at the Oakville Galleries, Canada (“Based on a true story”, 2012).

In 2012 Keren Cytter a.o. took part in “Made in Germany II” at the Sprengel Museum and at the Kunstverein Hannover. In 2011 she showed works at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (in “Found in translation”) and at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (in “Expanded Cinema”). Witte de With, Rotterdam presented her work in “Morality” in 2010 and in 2009 she participated at “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” in The New Museum, New York and at the 53th Venice Biennal.