Keren Cytter - Metamorphosis

The work of Israeli artist Keren Cytter includes films, performances, drawings, and photographs. Using experimental forms of narrative and playing with human perception, her work deals with themes such as social alienation, linguistic representation, and the function of the individual in given cultural systems. In Metamorphosis – presented by You Might Also Like e.V. – Keren Cytter shows her eponymous video work along with drawings. The artist dramatizes today's new normality, which is dominated by social media and the internet and characterized by a state of permanent networking, circulation, and updated presence, leading to the collapse of clear boundaries between private and public. Her video works are a critical example of the ways in which media content, imagery, style, emotion, and experience engage the viewer in multiple ways. Metamorphosis is composed of a variety of footage, combining YouTube videos, historical documentaries, and Hollywood films such as James Bond and Scream with "off-screen" voices and "Kush 'n' money instrumental rap beat" from Browski Music. The narrative is non-linear and often disorienting. Through the use of techniques such as diegesis in time and space, subtitles, close-ups, and circular loops, Cytter breaks narrative conventions and creates a sense of displacement in the viewer's mind. The repetition in her work stages different times that are simultaneously the same yet different episodes that never seem to end. The result is a microcosmic display of emotion in which longing is mixed with nostalgia and the line between comedy and tragedy is blurred. Presented in rapid succession and rhythm, only a thin narrative thread about sex and crime becomes discernible in the video, while the theme of paranoia serves as an overarching narrative. The influence of fear on our everyday lives is told less as an individual problem, but rather as a general condition in the age of the Internet.