Keren Cytter Globe an art initiative by Deutsche Bank, Photo Alex Kraus
Keren Cytter’s work explores human relationships and behaviour, and the dramatic conventions used to express them on stage and screen with movement, language, film, video and light. Inspired by the artist’s own life and that of her friends, Cytter’s work presents love, desire, loss and the vagaries of human communication, all the while scrambling the standard codes, narratives and imagery used to depict these themes.
Cytter’s recent work has focused increasingly on live performances, such as The Secret Diaries of Linda Schultz, a performance staged in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2009, in collaboration with Cytter’s dance theatre group D.I.E. (Dance International Europe).
Show Real Drama (2011) is written and directed by Cytter, and based on the life of two of her actors, Susie Meyer and Fabian Stumm. Having graduated from the University of Acting in Salzburg, Germany, Meyer and Stumm soon find themselves unemployed and isolated from the entertainment business in old Europe. After countless failed attempts to get hired, they decide to write a script for scenes that they would one day like to act. Show Real Drama is a play about how to live, how to act and how to perform being an actor. The two actors flip between scenes that refer to relationships and memories, reality and the false drama of making a showreel.
Keren Cytter (born 1976, Israel, lives and works in New York) inhabits a number of roles in her work as an artist – including that of choreographer, director, filmmaker, graphic designer, writer and sound-designer – utilising the vocabulary of each art form to make works that function both as celebration and critique of the medium. Recent solo exhibitions of Cytter’s work include Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011) Keren Cytter: Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011) and X Initiative, New York (2009).
Part of the series The Tanks: Art in Action
Don't miss Keren Cytter: Performer / Audience / Mirror
