Art Statements - Art 37 Basel - Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter: The Victim (excerpt), 2006, Video DVD 5 min.

Courtesy Elisabeth Kaufmann Gallery, Zurich

First of all: Congratulations on winning The Baloise Art Prize, and then secondly: What does is mean for your artistic career that you’ve been selected for “Art Statements” and have now won the art prize?

Well, it’s very nice! It’s 25,000 CHF and a lot of exposure. I’m working on a film that is going to be filmed in Rotterdam in autumn and the prize will cover many expenses related to that production. Also I’m going to pay the rent which I haven’t been doing for a long time!

You’ve created “The Victim” especially for “Art Statements”. How did you come up with the idea for the work?

I wanted to do something with a lot of talking. I wanted many voices and I wanted it to sound a little bit like music every now and then. I wanted to maintain some sort of narrative but I also wanted it to be played in loop – without beginning, middle or end. The looping because my friends told me, that they disliked the fact, that you often enter a video installation in the middle of the story and then you have to watch the whole thing afterwards from the beginning.

There are very few breaks in the conversation. Different announcements overlap one another constantly. How come?

A friend of mine told me, that he showed a video work at a biannual in Spain. The beginning and the end of the piece was without words and people loved those parts. The middle part on the other hand contained talking, which people didn’t like. Therefore I found it interesting to irritate people and do a work with constant talking and no moments of silence.

So the text and the spoken word are essential for the filmic structure?

Yes, the video is mostly based on spoken text. When the characters stop talking, their thoughts are still heard. One character's sentence is cut and decomposed by the words of another character. The text overlaps the images, sometimes in harmony and at other times with a comic dissonance. The words connect the different images. Although the images follow the events in the video, they isolate the characters from their actions and from the objects around them. The images do so out of commitment to the a text that, even when it is referring to the plot, still moves within the limits of the structure that bounds it and also forces the characters to behave unnaturally. The beginning and the end of the video are unclear: the beginning of the video will react to the end. And the characters become aware that they are running in a loop.

Where does your inspiration come from – are your works self-referential or do you work with any specific strategies or artistic agenda?

I don’t know - but I don’t believe in artistic strategies like working artistically with identity, feminism, politics and so on. I rather believe in an abstract strategy; beginning every project from a new and different point.

But your work nevertheless seems to comment on and challenge the classic filmic narration and structure? The coherence between cause and effect is almost completely demolished…

Well watching movies is a big part of the culture I come from. Therefore I’m interested in this media and it’s a language that I don’t need to study. I’m quite pleased with a lot of Lars von Triers’ film for instance. Only I don’t like when films become too lecturing or political. Either you should do art or you should do politics - like I said earlier: I simply believe in making different movies.

Keren Cytter is born in Israel but lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.		Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.		Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.
Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.		Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.		Keren Cytter: Video still, 2006.