Keren Cytter (; born 22 August 1977) is an Israeli visual artist and writer.
Biography
Cytter, born 22 August 1977, spent her childhood in Israel and went on to study visual arts at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv. After finding success in various galleries in her home country, she moved to Amsterdam on a scholarship from De Ateliers where she studied with Willem de Rooij and Marlene Dumas. Her scope of work includes film, video installations, performance, drawings and photography. She is also a writer of novels, theatre plays and poetry.
Work
Video Art
After graduating from De ateliers in Amsterdam, Cytter made several video works that went on to be shown internationally including The Date Series (2004, a series of short narratives written, filmed and produced in the period of one year), The Victim (2006), Repulsion (2005, based on Polanski's Repulsion), and The Milk Man (2003). Among her most famous work is Der Spiegel from 2007. Four Seasons (2009) is another example of essential Cytter: the absurdist low-fi mixture of a variety of film genres, from Film noir to Melodrama, culminates in the iconic shot of a burning Christmas tree set to the dramatic music of Ferrante & Teicher.
Dance and Theatre
In 2008 Cytter formed a dance company called D.I.E NOW (Dance International Europe Now) consisting of 5 non-professional dancers. Their first production History in the Making – The True Story of John Webber, which was based on a wide range of influences including Pina Bausch, Samuel Beckett, Disney on Ice, Michael Jackson, Yvonne Rainer and the 1980s dance-floor filler Lambada, went on an international tour and was presented in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London, The Kitchen in New York City, Tramway in Glasgow and Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.
The same year the British magazine Art Review ran a cover story on her entitled "I just wanted to attract attention".
She initiated her foundation APE – art projects era together with Dutch curator Maaike Gouwenberg in 2010. The aim of the organization is to develop projects (performances, exhibitions, printed matter, meetings) that cannot necessarily be realized within traditional institutional formats or frameworks.
Later that year she wrote and directed the play Show Real Drama, produced by APE and partly based on the lives of its two actors, Susanne Meyer and Fabian Stumm. In the piece, which uses videos and repetitive dialogue and movements creating a fractured yet empathetic storyline, they are struggling with the demanding entertainment business while their relationship is slowly falling apart. The production met with great success, the Houston Chronicle calling it "intriguing (...) something deconstructionist architect Frank Gehry might conjure if he were a playwright; a story pulled apart at the seams then re-configured with cool wit and 21st-century angst." As of 2014, the play has been performed all around the world from London, New York City and Houston to Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.
In the spring of 2010 her work was featured on the cover of the American Art Magazine Artforum, which ran an extensive story on her body of work.
Her next play Anke is Gone or I Eat Pickles At Your Funeral opened in Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer in 2011 and was invited to the Images Festival Toronto in 2012.
In 2013 Cytter collaborated with musicians Keira Fox, Charlie Feinstein and David Aird on Vociferous, a fluid combination of musical concert, video work and performance which was presented at the ICA Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Adrian Searle wrote in his The Guardian review: "As a mix of live performance and video, the recent collaboration between Adam Curtis and Massive Attack at the Manchester International Festival set a standard. Vociferous is both more intimate, more alienating, and more of a mash-up (...) After a bit I gave up trying to follow anything like a story, if there was one, or to chase the projected imagery, which came and went intermittently, first on one screen, then another. I felt a bit of a berk, running through the crowd with a notebook, trying to keep up, like an undercover cop blowing my own cover. Towards the end, Fox and Feinstein take up the electronic drums, and Fox starts singing from a ragged sheet of lyrics, the music hitting such a pitch that my nostril-hairs start to vibrate in sympathy."
Projects
After six years in Berlin, Cytter relocated to New York City in 2012 where she initiated a quarterly publication focusing on art and poetry. Published by APE, it has so far featured Nora Schultz, John Kelsey and writings of Josef Strau, Matthew Dickman, Roman Baembaev, Roger van Voorhees and Sylvia Mae Gorelick.