BERLIN.- In Keren Cytter’s video works, characters frequently appear confined within their own mental or physical spaces. Her videos often illustrate the tension between desire for change and the constraints that prevent it, reflecting a powerful sense of being caught in a neverending loop.
This exhibition features Keren Cytter’s 8 mm film trilogy “Meltdown” – Hot Lava Night, Queens in Queens, Meltdown – alongside a selection of her latest drawings. The “meltdown” serves as a manifestation of the internal states of Cytter’s characters as well as the fragmented, chaotic world they inhabit. While the world around them draws ever closer to destruction, the characters seek a way out in their relationships, making the “Meltdown” trilogy a kind of love story.
In Hot Lava Night radio reports depict the extent of a fictitious catastrophic flood that leads to a global crisis of unimaginable proportions. While showcasing people’s capacity for compassion and unity, the film follows the blossoming of a young romance that begins in New York and ends at a coastal refuge - a place untouched by devastation, where the boundaries between fiction and reality are blurred.
Keren Cytter's films are subtle montages of impressions, memories, images, conversations and dreams, as well as precise observations of everyday life. They depict coexistence and social changes while breaking through classical interpretation schemes and linguistic conventions with their non-linear, cyclical narrative. The materiality of 8mm film with its grainy texture and inherent imperfections amplifies the sense of disorientation and decay that permeates Cytter’s narrative landscapes.
The lonely cat lady in Queens in Queens is also caught in repetition, seemingly trapped in an uncertain state between dream and awakening, almost like a prisoner of her own life. The film explores the theme of violence, showing a woman who arms herself and retreats, covered in blood, to her apartment.
In the third film Meltdown the leader of a witch trio, who is described as one of the last brave humans while everyone else is caught in cowardice, becomes a target herself. As a recurring motif she wears red hair, red lipstick, and a leather jacket. For our couple in love, escaping from everyday life seems to be the only solution, even if it means listening to Taylor Swift songs. The combination of witch symbolism and pop culture gives Cytter’s characters a fascinating duality – they appear both threatening and mundane, rebellious and vulnerable.
Keren Cytter’s films disrupt conventional storytelling, forsaking linear plots in favor of a sequence of fragmented, often contradictory scenes. This effect is further heightened by the visual and auditory layering of elements. Cytter’s use of AI software for the sound introduces a modern, almost dystopian layer, where technology itself becomes part of the catastrophe threatening her characters. The combination of 8mm film and AI technology underscores the tension between the analog past and the digital present, illustrating the ever-present threat of obsolescence and the fragility of both human and artificial worlds.
Keren Cytter, born in Tel Aviv in 1977, currently lives and works in New York and Münster. Since 2022, she has held a professorship in Advanced Photography at the University of Fine Arts Münster. In 2021, Cytter received the Guggenheim Fellowship for exceptional talent in the arts. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2020), Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019), Museion Bolzano (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014), Tate Modern, London (2012), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010), MUMOK, Vienna (2007), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2005). Her feature film ‘The Wrong Movie’ was selected this year (2024) for the Berlin International Film Festival.
