Keren Cytter & John Roebas
Curated by Natalie Keppler & Andreas Wagner in collaboration with HAMLET
Keren Cytter (*1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel) choreographs an exhibition from drawings, two newly produced animated films and videos in which „Size Matters“. The personal examination of childhood and adolescence is negotiated with expectations and experiences of growing up and coming of age. The artist Keren Cytter interweaves this examination and these negotiations with a fictitious layer by means of different media.
„Size Matters“ physically compels viewers to take a different perspective and to ironically question the relevance of size on different levels of meaning and development.
Although the felt pen drawings, the site specific work on the windows and the two animated videos in the first room are on the eye level of children, they force a confrontation with the tragedy of maturing.
For Cytter, adolescence is black and white, so represented in the work „Experimental Film“. In her early genre video from 2002 dubbed in Hebrew, Cytter still acts as protagonist. In the next room of the exhibition, the images of the film change between black and white and colored – visually and metaphorically. However, „Des Trous“ (Holes) brings the artist, now based in New York, back to Israel in 2018. She sets off on a journey that sparks mixed feelings between detachment and melancholia.
“I return as a ghost.“
Transience and a placement in time is recorded stylistically in the imagination of the ages of the cast of the film. The Israeli singer Corrine Allal, born in Tunisia in 1955, is a figure equal to the members of the family of the narrator, who impropriates images and memories of others until “we turns into I“. The texts of the French voice over sound like quoted lyrics and interweave with the soundtrack of Allal, Yoko Ono and Edith Piaf.
“Look at the Skies. They are falling.“
In the collaborative project „Detour“, Keren Cytter and the US artist John Roebas (*1985 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras) create an archeology of contemporary mythologies. They associatively mix origins of a supposed high culture in the land of two rivers mesopotamia with western and christian connotated relics of urban life in Manhattan oscillating between anointment and medication.
The hereby developed re-cartographing is transformed in a process of sculptural cooperation, fragmenting and new creation of connected bodies and so forms an alternative worlds and body landscapes within a common referential system.
Keren Cytter (*1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel)
lives and works in New York City, USA
„Detour“ is a collaborative project by Keren Cytter and John Roebas
John Roebas (*1985 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras)
lives and works in New York City, USA
Natalie Keppler