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7/5/2010

Keren Cytter and Barbara Kruger

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Keren Cytter

Curated by Magnus af Petersens

Keren Cytter has rapidly established herself internationally as one of the most interesting and unique artists on the contemporary art scene. At the mere age of 30 (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, currently living and working in Berlin), in the last eight years she has produced more than 50 video works, written three novels and an opera libretto, started the dance and theatre company D.I.E. Now, won awards and is the darling of the art press. Last summer, she exhibited at the New Museums group show Younger Than Jesus and participated in the Venice Biennale. Cytter says: “I studied art because I wanted to go to New York and wash dishes.” *

Alongside her prolific production of short video works and two longer films, she also creates performance art, or rather, works on the boundary between drama and dance. Narration is vital in her films and performances, and in addition to the scripts she has also written three novels. Moderna Museet’s exhibition of Keren Cytter, her first in a Nordic art institution, opens on 8 May. A selection of the artist’s best films and several drawings will be featured, including a new suite made especially for the exhibition, along with text-based works.

Keren Cytter’s topics often include love stories, violence, sex and murder. She applies a non-linear narrative, with a hand-held camera. The actors – formerly mostly amateurs and friends of the artist but more recently professional actors – switch roles with each other, or read their stage directions out loud. Scenes are repeated, but with a different course of events, with voiceovers or alternative dialogues. The films are usually set in simply-furnished apartments, especially the kitchen regions, suggesting an obvious connection to kitchen sink realism. The literary tone of the dialogue, however, is far from realistic, writes Magnus af Petersens in the catalogue, adding: “Instead the films are deliberate hybrids between seemingly incompatible genres, between home videos and auteur films in the spirit of the French nouvelle vague, between Dogme and docu-soap or sitcom. But her films are above all existential dramas about the human condition, about love and hate in our thoroughly medialised age.”

Narrative is central to Cytter’s work, which is characterised by multiple layers and references to other film-makers, to horror movies and reality TV. Hitchcock, Pasolini, Cassavetes and Fassbinder are a few of the directors from whom she gathers inspiration and occasionally material. One of Cytter’s novels, The Seven Most Exciting Hours of Mr. Trier’s Life, is based on an authentic TV interview with the Danish film director Lars von Trier. In the style of a detective novel, it tells a story starting when von Trier’s mother experiences the first labour pain and ending with the delivery of baby Lars.

Cytter says she wants to puzzle the audience, for each new film using a new set of hard-to-interpret rules. A form of distancing method in the Brechtian spirit can be sensed here, and formally, the many retakes of her script contain a reference to Samuel Beckett. Despite this abstraction, Keren Cytter’s films can be experienced as easily accessible, even without being familiar with her work. The situations concern universal subjects that the viewer can identify with: relationships, love, jealousy, death.

Paradoxically, Keren Cytter’s work comprises both a high degree of abstraction and familiarity. Perhaps this can be explained by her fascination for film and media clichés, and the way in which she applies them. She sees clichés as a kind of script for how we live our lives, and as interesting material, rather than as an object to criticise. The ultimate cliché, “I love you” – possibly the world’s most hackneyed sound-bite – is, for instance, processed in her tragicomic work Dreamtalk (2005, featured in the exhibition), in which a ménage a trois of 30s-something slackers with intentionally stilted intonation pass the three words between them. “She chose the winner, how boring,” says one of them in the final scene, and the dialogue ends: “My heart disappeared with the camera.”

The latest manifestation of Cytter’s prolific output is the dance/theatre/performance company D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe Now). Among its pursuits, D.I.E. Now has staged a production at The Kitchen, New York, during Performa 09. “We had to invent dances because we said, ‘We are a dance company,’” Keren Cytter explains the origin of this constellation. The idea, as can be expected, is to dissolve genre boundaries and deconstruct the artist-audience relationship.

A longer film, New Age (2007, 75.44 min), will be shown in the Moderna Museet cinema, while nine other films will be shown in the exhibition spaces on Floor 2, together with drawings and what at first glance appear to be didactic wall texts by the artist.

The catalogue, which includes scripts for six of the films and an essay by Magnus af Petersens, is designed by Stefania Malmsten and distributed in collaboration with Sternberg Press, New York.

Keren Cytter is represented by the galleries Pilar Corrias, London, Schau Ort, Zürich, and Christian Nagel, Berlin. This spring, Cytter will also be exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She has presented a performance at Tate Modern, London and exhibited at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. In 2008, Keren Cytter participated in Manifesta, and in 2009, she was featured in Fare Mondi/Making Worlds at the Venice Biennale, with Daniel Birnbaum as the artistic director.

The exhibition Keren Cytter is sponsored by Vinge.

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Barbara Kruger

Curated by Camilla Carlberg

In time for Moderna Museet’s 50th anniversary in 2008, a new work by the American artist Barbara Kruger was installed in the museum entrance areas.

The work consists of three large, wallmounted collages: two in the main entrance and one in the entrance facing the water, as well as two embellished pillars in the main entrance. Barbara Kruger has worked in the style for which she has become famous – the colours red and white dominate, blackand- white photos and text interact in an indivisible unity. Barbara Kruger mixes her own words with quotes from writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mary McCarthy and Roland Barthes.

The work will be shown for three or four years before it is replaced by another artist’s work

Image: Keren Cytter, In Search for Brothers/Alla ricerca dei fratelli 2008 ©
Digital video, färg/colour, stereo 16:56 min Pilar Corrias Gallery

Press preview on Thursday, 6 May at 10 am
the exhibition will be introduced by Keren Cytter, Magnus af Petersens, the curator, and Director of Moderna Museet Lars Nittve.

Press Department
Phone: +46 8 5195 5281 pressavdelningen@modernamuseet.se
Press Secretary Maria Morberg Phone: +46 8 5195 5279 m.morberg@modernamuseet.se

Opening 8 may 2010

Moderna Museet
Island of Skeppsholmen, Stockholm
Tuesday 10-20, Wednesday-Sunday 10-18
Monday closed
Admission
80 Sek / 60 Sek (reduced price)
Free admission for those 18 and under

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