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1/7/2005

Keren Cytter / Scott Myles

Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich

Keren Cytter

Israeli artist Keren Cytter (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in Amsterdam) tells stories. She does so through experimental movies that draw on a variety of exciting genres, ranging from film noir via fictitious documentaries through to pure cinema verité. She tells short stories in which the everyday collides with the mysterious.

Keren Cytter also tells quite normal but absurd short stories that tread a thin line between the comical, the grotesque and the tragic while also functioning as a commentary on the medium of film. Her films document her surroundings, her friends and family, who act like characters in a kind of dreamworld in which egocentric goals, profound frustrations, personal aspirations and intimate wishes are the content – usually they bring to mind the unnatural amateurish depictions at theater castings.

Cytter deconstructs traditional narrative structures by superimposing video clips with non-harmonized voice and sound sequences that are often doubled up with subtitles, and in this way conjures up an often surprising and always arbitrary reality. Her films arise from image/voice collages that are based on real and fictitious events as well as from autobiographical material. The films possess a special attraction which is expressed through the inner, psychological tension of the actors. They often personify youth, insecure and tormented by existential angst, which through their geographical and cultural displacement find themelves in constant unease with themselves and their environment.

Kunsthalle Zürich is presenting Keren Cytter’s first international solo show in Switzerland. She spent the last four years at the studio program De Ateliers in Amsterdam, where most of the films were made – with the exception of a few shot in Israel. Cytter has chosen seven films for her Zurich show that, set within a marvelously fragile architectural structure of rows of wooden sheds, create an intimate world in which her multi-layered narratives are subject to even deeper deconstruction, and where her ostensibly easy-to-grasp film worlds of textual, audio and image levels increasingly meld.

Usually produced in a cheap and simple way, the videos imitate the genre of documentaries and yet the quotes and clichés taken from popular culture, film, Pop music and trash literature expand them, propelling them into a purely fictitious world where our ability to grasp things is sorely tested. For example, in The Family several levels of dialog blend, confusing us as gender roles and voices have been deliberately cross-wired. A young man mimes the role of a mother, the one-year old toddler is played by a 20-something-year-old man, the father is played by a young woman, and the other family members are played by the artist’s friends, who are her own age. The dialogs consist of a sequence of irrational insults and threats, mixed with wishes and praise. What makes this family conversation so bizarre is the clear absence of any “normal” conversation, replaced here by dark and hidden thoughts.

Kunsthalle Zürich would like to thank:
Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich
Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam
Swiss Re

Catalogue:
In collaboration with the Frankfurter Kunstverein an artist book will be published containing a Stream-of-Consciousness-Text by Keren Cytter, approx. 200 pages, Lukas & Sternberg, Berlin

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Scott Myles

The oeuvre of Scottish artist Scott Myles is strongly gestural. It consists of photographs, objects, serigraphs, paintings, and performance-based projects. They always exhibit a reference to social values (for example to generosity or communication), to subjective involvement, to the experience of the artist and the viewer as a central concern, and to an open Romantic stance toward these values. Moreover, artistic projects and sculptures he has already realized likewise play an important role, one Scott Myles repeatedly includes in his artistic endeavors.
In his first institutional solo show, the artist presents works of recent years and a group of sculptures and objects devised specially for Kunsthalle Zürich.

Of late, Scott Myles has focused on recontextualizations and appropriations of renowned works in art history and well-known symbols from everyday life. For some years, he has been collecting posters of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who in his exhibitions exposes his works to dissolution or transience, by giving the posters (printed with socio-critical content) or heaps of candy away to the viewers. Myles inverts this gesture of generosity and of the memento mori, transforming it into a new gesture: He paints over the posters with sentences such as “Performance Now”, “Learn the Language”, “Pointing in one Direction” or “It Hurts” and thus evokes something new, both for himself and the public. Presented in thin Plexiglas vitrines that have a carrying structure on only one side and require the wall on the other to stand steady, thus displaying great ambiguity in function between room divider, banner, and museum display, the posters always seem to be some relic of an action that has not been ended, while also agitating the viewer’s sensibilities.
In other pieces, he translates standardized public sign systems such as emergency exit signage into hand-made communications in the form of posters, thus appropriating them as individual systems of communication.

In recent work, Myles also brings the relationship of “objectified” prints and subjective gestural expression to bear in the form of large-sized posters that he prints with lines for a musical score and then revises with painted text – here, too, he turns meanings and effects this way and then that, for the texts on the standardized lines for notes become the medium of a subjective song that refuses to be read in the customary, objective way of musical notes, placing the tone and melody in the individual voice of the reader.

Scott Myles focuses in a whole series of projects on the notion of social generosity and the transformation of economic principles into intellectual values: For example, in the course of a year he used a series of magazine kiosks as if they were public libraries. He “borrowed” one magazine or newspaper each time from the kiosk and then, having read it, placed it back on the shelf at a different place in the same kiosk chain. And he added to it a small brochure that pointed to his having “borrowed” it. In other words, he intervened direct in the exchange of commodities and values, without this causing the respective store chain any loss.

The interaction of individual and environment through visibility and invisibility is central to one of his latest groups of works: he constructs room-dividing screens using silkscreened material which he then places in rooms as rotors or large “revolving doors”. Objects such as windows or former bus shelters are also part of this group – Myles transforms them with painterly gestures into hybrid objects that again transport and transform the meaning of the public and private dimensions to life. Using the graphic contrast of black versus white, here painting is a matter of individual gesture, not informative graffiti – placing the personal as inquiring and questioned gesture in space.

In his work, Scott Myles always uses contrast as an agitator: the subjective and the collective, the material and the intellectual, the public and the private, the transparent and the opaque – these opposites are present in his works formally in the analogy of the graphic black versus white, thus unleashing, though not depicting the gradations in-between as material and intellectual potentiality. Sentimentally, gesturally, and subjectively, Scott Myles appropriates existing forms as possible utopian was of being and yet always as potential rather than actual entities.

Kunsthalle Zürich would like to thank:
Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich
Luma Stiftung

Catalogue:
A catalogue is being produced.

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Public guided tours (in German):
NEW: Sunday tours at 2 pm respectively: 3.7. (Beatrix Ruf) / 7.8. (Samuel Leuenberger)
LUNCH-TIME GUIDED TOURS: Wednesdays at 12.30 pm: 13.7. / 3.8. (Samuel Leuenberger)

Opening times:
Tues/Wed/Fri 12-6pm, Sat/Sun 11am-5 pm, Thurs 12-8 pm, closed on Mondays

Our education and tours program is supported by Swiss Re

Image: Scott Myles

Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich

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