Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter (born 22 August 1977) is an Israeli visual artist and writer.

Cytter, born 22 August 1977, spent her childhood in Israel and went on to study visual arts at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv. She moved to Amsterdam on a scholarship from De Ateliers where she studied with Willem de Rooij and Marlene Dumas. Her scope of work includes film, video installations, performance, drawings and photography. She is also a writer of novels, theatre plays and poetry.

Cytter is best known for her textually based video art. Her narratives, although extremely fragmented, have a tendency to embody the post-modern self-awareness of the characters in her films. Through the development and execution of Cytter's unique style, she has found herself a niche in the art world which has brought her more and more critical attention and made her one of the most renowned artists of her generation.

After graduating from De ateliers in Amsterdam, Cytter made several works which went on to be shown internationally including The Date Series (2004, a series of short narratives written, filmed and produced in the period of one year), The Victim (2006), Repulsion (2005, based on Polanski's Repulsion), and The Milk Man (2003). Among her most famous work is Der Spiegel from 2007. In just one long shot she stages a Shakespearean drama in a stripped contemporary Berlin apartment in which a middle-aged woman is forced to confront the realities of her fading sexual attractiveness by a sadistic pair of younger women. Four Seasons (2009) is another example of essential Cytter: the absurdist low-fi mixture of a variety of film genres, from Film noir to Melodrama, culminates in the iconic shot of a burning Christmas tree set to the dramatic music of Ferrante & Teicher.

In 2008 Cytter formed a dance company called D.I.E NOW (Dance International Europe Now) consisting of 5 non-professional dancers. Their first production History in the Making - The True Story of John Webber, which was based on a wide range of influences including Pina Bausch, Samuel Beckett, Disney on Ice, Michael Jackson, Yvonne Rainer and the 1980s dance-floor filler Lambada, went on an international tour and was presented in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London, The Kitchen in New York City, Tramway in Glasgow and Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.

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