Keren Cytter at Pilar Corrias

Artist: Keren Cytter

Exhibition title: Ocean

Venue: Pilar Corrias, London, UK

Date: March 18 – May 7, 2016

Photography: © Damian Griffiths, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

Pilar Corrias is pleased to present Ocean, Keren Cytter’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, which brings together three recent videos: Game (2015), Metamorphosis (2015), Ocean (2014), and a new series of drawings.

Cytter’s films, video installations, and drawings depict social realities through experimental modes of storytelling. Her work explores the boundaries between reality and fiction, indefinite peripheries from which she derives new modes of editing.

The artist creates intensified scenes drawn from soap operas and American blockbuster movies in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production. Focusing less on the atmosphere and more on the storytelling she gives her plots unexpected endings. The result is a microcosmic display of emotions where desire is mixed with nostalgia and the line between the comic and tragic is blurred.

Game (2015), Metamorphosis (2015), Ocean (2014), are all characterised by a fractured, non-linear narrative, which is simultaneously confusing and familiar. The dialogues between her characters—often a cast of non-professional actors— are manipulated to function as form. Utilising techniques like diegetic time-space, subtitling, close-ups, and circular loops, Cytter breaks narrative convention and produces in the viewer a sense of displacement. The repetition in her works enacts different times that are simultaneously the same, yet different, episodes that never seem to reach an ending.

The exhibition’s architecture mirrors the way Cytter edits her work and distorts the viewer’s perception. Walls of different heights and dimensions, which layer and break down the physical space, force us to look at the artworks with a different mind-set, dismantling, once again, the supposed conventions of viewing.

Cytter’s new series of drawings, which are filtered through different styles and themes sourced from her environment, retain the characteristics of her oeuvre. As with her films, she depicts familiar objects, which are dissected and distorted, while enhancing an awareness of the process. The drawings have been arranged to converse with the gallery’s transformed space and initiate a dialogue, which challenges how artwork is perceived.

Keren Cytter (b. 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014); Video Art Manual, State of Concept, Athens (2014); Show Real Drama, Tate Modern Oil Tanks, London (2012); Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); The Hottest Day of the Year, Kunstverein München, Munich (2011); Project Series, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); The Mysterious Series, X Initiative, New York (2009); CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009); Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Huarte (2008); Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin (2008); Stuk Kunstcentrum, Leuven (2007); MUMOK, Vienna (2007)