EXHIBITION

Four Seasons: Keren Cytter

Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv District, Tel Aviv, 10/22/2009 - 12/04/2009

60 Ehad Ha’am Street

ABOUT

Keren Cytter is showing two video works, Four Seasons (2009) and Les Ruissellements du Diable (2008), and a selection of drawings in the Project Room. 

The film Four Seasons (2009) opens with a neo-noir celebration of late-Hitchcock-meets-1980s-kitsch: a record plays dramatic music by Ferrante & Teicher; thick fake blood drips onto white tiles; snow whirls through the apartment and a lone woman climbs a dark, smoky staircase. 

As the film unravels, conflicting narratives are revealed, switching between the stories of Stella, a tragic tale of heart-break and domestic murder, echoing Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Lucy. A voice-over describes the building using its architectural elements as metaphors for human behavior. Climaxing with a series of spontaneously combusting objects – birthday cake, Christmas tree, record player – Four Seasons is a homage to all that is fake, showcasing visual cliches, lo-fi special effects and deadpan delivery. Yet, somehow, Cytter creates a sense of poignancy rather than of cynicism. 

Four Seasons is not purely a deconstruction of the mise-en-scene, a comic pastiche or a cinematic critique. Rather, it forms a complex exploration of perception and memory; layers of language and image create a hierarchy of interpretation that is reliant upon collective and personal cultural signifiers. 

Cytter’s work emphasizes only multiple fragmented moments of feeling. Cytter flouts her style clashes manipulating these cultural tools with results that range from the banal to the sublime, from the embarrassingly comic to the vulgarly surreal. 

Keren Cytter (b. Israel, 1977) currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, and international biennials. Recently she was chosen second among "Top 100 Emerging Artists" by the Flash Art magazine. Latest shows featuring her work include "Making Worlds," the 53rd Venice Biennial, Italy, and the New Museum Triennial - "The Generational: Younger than Jesus," New York, NY, "Television Delivers People" at The Whitney Museum in New York; "50 moons of Saturn," The second Turin Triennial, Italy; The Yokohama Triennial, Japan; "Open Plan Living," Art TLV, Tel Aviv, Israel; Manifesta 7, Trentino, South-Tyrol, Italy; The second Moscow Biennial, in Russia; and the Lyon Biennial, "The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named," Lyon, France.

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Keren Cytter

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