Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter is known for numerous experimental film and video works that explore the influence of media culture on interpersonal relationships. In her works, the artist employs a non-linear, often cyclical logic to deconstruct classical narrative patterns, linguistic conventions, and meanings. Combining images sequences with asynchronous speech and sound, she creates idiosyncratic cinematic collages that conjure absurd, existentially urgent visual realities.

Keren Cytter’s films and videos are relatable in that they are produced with minimal effort, leave little unsaid, and occasionally zoom in explicitly on the storyline and its protagonists. This is rarely staged, in contrast to the highly orchestrated spoken text. Her montages of memories and imaginings form multi-layered, poetic compositions of a disturbingly grotesque character. Cytter’s intensified scenes employ narrative means to defamiliarize the overwhelming artificiality of the depicted situations, thus rendering it visible.

In Cytter’s work, transitions are fluid between film and text, text and performance, performance and space, space and drawing, drawing and film. The Meltdown film trilogy (2023/24) achieves this by juxtaposing love stories and characters who have already lived through end times. The characters are seemingly trapped in communicational and relationship loops that can only be ruptured by images of internal or external violence, and which then, paradoxically, seem to offer a way out. Object (2016) also depicts an escalation of misogynistic violence in a private apartment: casual banter in Russian between friends (or “friends in crime”) culminates in a staged femicide. In three acts, one female and three male characters demonstrate power structures and the abuse of power in heteronormative, patriarchal societies. Cytter explores where hypervisibility nearly makes violence invisible, tracing the origins and impacts of brutality in a daily life saturated by media.

The exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus presents Keren Cytter’s 8mm Meltdown film trilogy—consisting of three parts: Hot Lava Night, Queens in Queens, and Meltdown (2023/24)—, the film Object (2016), a selection of drawings (2001–23), a sculptural project created together with artist colleague John Roebas (b.1985 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) (2019), and a site-specific window installation.

The multidisciplinary work of Keren Cytter (b. 1977 in Tel Aviv, lives and works in New York and Münster) encompasses films, soap operas, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, zines, self-help books, children’s books, as well as organized festivals. Keren Cytter has been Professor of Expanded Photography at Kunstakademie Münster since 2022. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2023), Kunst Museum Winterthur (2020), Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv (2019), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Bolzano (Museion) (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015), Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen (2014), Tate Modern London (2012), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011), Moderna Museet Stockholm (2010), mumok Vienna (2007), KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin (2006), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005), and Kunsthalle Zurich (2005), among others. Her feature film The Wrong Movie was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024.

An interview brochure with a conversation between Keren Cytter and Melanie Ohnemus will be published for the exhibition.

Curated by Melanie Ohnemus