At the mere age of 33 (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, currently living and working in Berlin), in the last eight years Keren Cytter has produced more than 50 video works, written three novels and an opera libretto, started the dance and theatre company D.I.E. Now, won awards and is the darling of the art press. Last summer, she exhibited at the New Museum's group show Younger Than Jesus and participated in the Venice Biennale. Cytter says:

 

I studied art because I wanted to go to New York and wash dishes.

Moderna Museet’s exhibition of Keren Cytter, her first in a Nordic art institution, opens on 8 May. A selection of the artist’s best films and several drawings will be featured, including a new suite made especially for the exhibition, along with text-based works.

 

Keren Cytter’s topics often include love stories, violence, sex and murder. She applies a non-linear narrative, the stories often shot with a hand-held camera. The actors – amateurs and friends of the artist, but more recently professional actors – switch roles with each other, or read their stage directions out loud. Scenes are repeated, but with a different course of events, with voiceovers or alternative dialogues. The films are usually set in simply-furnished apartments, especially the kitchen regions, suggesting a connection to kitchen sink realism. The literary tone of the dialogue, however, is far from realistic, writes Magnus af Petersens in the catalogue, adding:

 
“Instead the films are deliberate hybrids between seemingly incompatible genres, between home videos and auteur films in the spirit of the French nouvelle vague, between Dogme and docu-soap or sitcom. But her films are above all existential dramas about the human condition, about love and hate in our thoroughly medialised age."

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Keren Cytter at Moderna Museet, 2010 Photo: Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet