Performance not as representation but as a social condition.
Artist Keren Cytter works across video, film, performance, theater, dance, and drawing. She is widely recognized for her distinctive moving-image works and theatrical productions that blur the boundaries between cinema, performance, and rehearsal. Her practice is characterized by fragmentation, repetition, and abrupt tonal shifts, foregrounding language, gesture, and structure over narrative-driven storytelling. Dialogue in her films is often circular or disjointed, exposing how meaning, intimacy, and power are constructed—and destabilized—through speech.
Cytter’s works frequently examine relationships, gender roles, desire, and interpersonal conflict, presenting intimacy as something scripted, rehearsed, and performed. By collapsing distinctions between actor and character, fiction and autobiography, Cytter treats performance not as representation but as a social condition. Humor, melodrama, and discomfort coexist in her work, producing films that are at once analytical and emotionally charged.
Stylistically, Cytter embraces constraint and apparent simplicity: sparse settings, minimal props, frontal staging, and economical editing. These decisions heighten attention to rhythm, timing, and repetition, allowing subtle formal shifts to generate significant emotional and conceptual impact. Her films often resist narrative closure, instead exposing the mechanics of filmmaking—editing, scripting, acting—as active forces shaping perception.
