Keren Cytter at SCHLOSS

Artist: Keren Cytter

Exhibition title: The Mirror of Simple Souls

Venue: SCHLOSS, Oslo, Norway

Date: April 28 – May 20, 2017

Photography: Courtesy of the artist and SCHLOSS, Oslo. Photo: Vegard Kleven

SCHLOSS is pleased to present “The Mirror of Simple Souls”, a solo exhibition by Keren Cytter.

– Pain is just another form of entertainment

Keren Cytter (b. 1977) is one of the most prominent artists of her generation. She has produced more than 60 video works, her practice also including performance, drawing, writing of novels, poetry, and screenplays, as well as photography and curating.

Cytter’s videos and films can be seen as inheriting a tradition lost in today’s cinematic landscape. In the 60’s and 70’s, directors like Pasolini and Fassbinder emerged from the literary world; of novels, poetry and theatre writing. Their cinema was a “cinema of poets”, the text placed at the centre – the right word in the right position was the starting point for the moving images, added around the text as the core and the backbone of the movie. Similar to this cinematic form, Cytter’s films can be seen as purposely rough, hyper-artificial and with an anti-natural taste that has more in common with theatre than movies. An example of this approach is the video presented in the exhibition, OBJECT, a kind of Russian mafia movie shot in her New York apartment, three men and a young woman moving through narrow spaces. The story, as in other cases with the artist, depicts and centers around grotesque cruelties that the characters perpetrate against each other. The actors perform with a certain catatonic mood, drawing the profile of perverted human relationships, families and love. The exhibition also includes drawings from a recent series made using big sheets of mirror paper, the same material used to project the film. The surface of the works, in the area not covered by colours, reflects both the place where they are installed and the viewers. In this way, the drawings are impossible to document properly and they require the viewer to be physically present. Cytter’s drawings are always made in bright colours. The style can be childish, or with psychedelic elements, and some words calligraphically shifting to altered shapes. The artist declares hidden stories and details from her everyday life through illustrative images. Even in its most banal aspect, these details are brought to surface by using the space where the artist lives as a backdrop.
– Antonio Grulli

Keren Cytter (born 1977 in Tel Aviv) lives and works in New York.