August 10, 2009
In
Uncategorized
August 7, 2009
In
New York Times
September 10, 2009
In
Uncategorized
naomi leshem | runways | benteli
October 14, 2015
In
Uncategorized
keren cytter – four seasons – le plateau
March 30, 2009
In
Ynet
March 27, 2009
In
NRG
May 8, 2009
In
Haaretz
December 18, 2009
In
Carrots & Refreshments
In his new exhibition “Carrots & Refreshments”, Amikam Toren will show two new series of video works from the years 2008-2009, a sculpture, and paintings from the series “Armchair paintings”.
About the videos: Twelve stories, strangely moving tales touched with humour, edged with the surreal. True stories, narratives of experience from the artist’s life, selected from a period of 40 years.
The precision of observation and the almost casual, natural humanity are arresting but, while the narratives themselves are deeply affecting, their form as voice-overs to fixed camera films of the scene of their occurrence has a powerful impact on our perception of location. Background and foreground, setting and story, softly change places as our listening and viewing shift as impulses to imagination.
Six short tales assembled into a seventeen minute anthology of acute reflection.
In Toren’s work the most elemental form or mundane object has its very material redeployed to suck out hidden meaning. It’s an alchemical process: a little assistance, a redistribution of resources, is all that is required to reveal the energy and significance contained within dull matter. Object, sign, experience, each and every casually accepted, and more often discarded, mundanity is open to challenge, transformation and adjustment, teasing out truths beyond its basic nature. In this exhibition, short deadpan videos, paintings and the orange peel sculpture are revealed as harbingers of formal and fanciful delight
October 22, 2009
In
Four Seasons
Keren Cytter / Four Seasons
Opening: 22/10/2009 Closing: 04/12/2009
Keren Cytter is showing two video works, Four Seasons (2009) and Les Ruissellements du Diable (2008), and a selection of drawings in the Project Room.
The film Four Seasons (2009) opens with a neo-noir celebration of late-Hitchcock-meets-1980s-kitsch: a record plays dramatic music by Ferrante & Teicher; thick fake blood drips onto white tiles; snow whirls through the apartment and a lone woman climbs a dark, smoky staircase.
As the film unravels, conflicting narratives are revealed, switching between the stories of Stella, a tragic tale of heart-break and domestic murder, echoing Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Lucy. A voice-over describes the building using its architectural elements as metaphors for human behavior. Climaxing with a series of spontaneously combusting objects – birthday cake, Christmas tree, record player – Four Seasons is a homage to all that is fake, showcasing visual cliches, lo-fi special effects and deadpan delivery. Yet, somehow, Cytter creates a sense of poignancy rather than of cynicism.
Four Seasons is not purely a deconstruction of the mise-en-scene, a comic pastiche or a cinematic critique. Rather, it forms a complex exploration of perception and memory; layers of language and image create a hierarchy of interpretation that is reliant upon collective and personal cultural signifiers.
Cytter’s work emphasizes only multiple fragmented moments of feeling. Cytter flouts her style clashes manipulating these cultural tools with results that range from the banal to the sublime, from the embarrassingly comic to the vulgarly surreal.
Adapted from Kathy Noble, Frieze Magazine 123, May 2009
Les Ruissellements du Diable (The Devil’s Streams), refers to Cortazar’s story, “Las Babas del Diablo” (“The Droolings of the Devil”). Cytter’s video, trails a photographer chasing an infatuation through the reality of a photograph. Via emotional projection, the photograph and the TV screen are his sole connection to Michelle, a translator on television. Both characters eventually realize they do not actually exist while the empty nature of the photograph remains. Softer than her usual approach, Cytter’s solitary focus in The Devil’s Streams complements the mood of the Asian music throughout the film allowing scenes, characters, gender, and stories to seamlessly collide. Re-presented through her poly-vocal and deconstructed approach to cinema, the stories and conventions she alters find a new relevance to contemporary times.
Cytter applies Cortazar’s self-conscious narrative by lifting lines from the text for a reflexive voiceover musing on its own unreliability. The two onscreen performers, a man and a woman, externalize the conceit by explaining the story to the viewer—and to each other—as they simultaneously act it out.
Cytter is at her best when pushing the material to extremes: match cuts that meld the two characters (the man picks up a cigarette from an ashtray, the woman puffs it) and shock effects (graphic footage of male masturbation) that ensnare both the audience and the filmmakers in the characters’ circular voyeurism. And yet, what is most remarkable about the video has less to do with Cortazar’s “The Devil’s Drool” than with his novel Hopscotch, which offers the reader alternate paths through the chapters. With Les Ruissellements du Diable, Cytter has managed to create an emotionally intact narrative completely devoid of a beginning, middle and end. The characters watch TV, smoke, sulk, jerk off, meet in the park, spill a bottle of water, and hold hands in a series of self-contained but interrelated shots that could be reshuffled without losing coherence or disrupting the structure—or so it would seem.
Adapted from Thomas Micchelli, The Brooklyn Rail, January 2009
Keren Cytter (b. Israel, 1977) currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, and international biennials.
Recently she was chosen second among “Top 100 Emerging Artists” by the Flash Art magazine, and received the first-ever Absolut Art Award:
http://press.absolut.com/templates/PressPage____7458.aspx
Latest shows featuring her work include “Making Worlds,” the 53rd Venice Biennial, Italy, and the New Museum Triennial – “The Generational: Younger than Jesus,” New York, NY, “Television Delivers People” at The Whitney Museum in New York; “50 moons of Saturn,” The second Turin Triennial, Italy; The Yokohama Triennial, Japan; “Open Plan Living,” Art TLV, Tel Aviv, Israel; Manifesta 7, Trentino, South-Tyrol, Italy; The second Moscow Biennial, in Russia; and the Lyon Biennial, “The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named,” Lyon, France
September 3, 2009
In
-80
Shahar Yahalom / -80
Opening: 03/09/2009 Closing: 09/10/2009
-80°C is the temperature at which bodies are stored while waiting for the future life – an encoded extension to the future – as well as embryos and organs for transplantation. The exhibition space is planned to serve as an experimental lab or a refuge of an alchemist/architect/philosopher busy with creating a new reality by sorcery and calculation: every sculpture may be translated into a mathematical equation.
Jacques Derrida defined the term ‘deconstruction’ as a method and not a style. An attempt to attribute Shahar Yahalom’s work to any style seems forced, and one should rather focus on her method. The majority of the compositions in the exhibition are based on two poles – one vertical and the other horizontal making together a cross (in the architectural connotation*), an unhesitating static structure. The strong juxtaposition of two intersecting axes lies at the base of architecture since the early ages. Postmodernism has undermined this stability by breaking angles and conventions.
At the center of a human skeleton there is a cross-like bone called sacrum (‘holy’ in Latin) and ‘krestetz’ in Slavic languages (‘krest’ = ‘cross’). According to the Zohar book, at the time of resurrection the lower part of the sacrum, usually identified with the coccyx (etzem ha-luz), will expand to four directions to form the body anew. The sacrum is the Foundation Stone of the human body, responsible for its posture; however, in art as in anatomy the physical stability does not depend on the structure alone but on the flow of life itself. Without it the structure will collapse.
Thus, the center poles are well positioned, and the artist may now begin her dance. She scatters other axes in the space as broken arrows. The small details hang on the axes, holding on to them, while their form becomes less geometrical and more organic.
Does the artist rely here on chance creating a chaotic structure and letting it grow as it pleases? It is indeed and intentional coincidence. In this intelligent way a plant occupies its designated space, feels it and sends its tendrils in every direction.
The exhibition space seems spellbound; otherwise how did the artist set these impossible sculptures? The space is pierced, unraveled, dissected, sliced, drawn with strings, straggling on hooks, alluring with its transparent screen traps, An astute pleasure.
Perhaps there is no magic here, but rather the gravitation laws were changed? The artist created a universe with two moons as in a recurring childhood dream. A heavenly duplicity as opposed to an earthly duplicity – the exhibition is designed according to a principle of duplicity, and from a certain point the view is repeated.
Perhaps the afterlife is here? The bones of fish from the Chernobyl area are curled as tendrils. Will the new world be created as a result of a crisis? In Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two ideograms: one means ‘danger’ and the other ‘new possibilities’.
The artist is fascinated with Gothicism, with the structure of a cathedral and its emptiness as opposed to the sculptural images. Yahalom sticks to daring perpendiculars and diagonals that strive to stretch the boundaries of matter and spirit and to defy the skies. The gothic creatures are not in the exhibition, but their presence is duly felt. Stubbornly they creep into the space leaving behind marks of claws on the glass. They scratch the slides with sharp beaks chucking their excretions here and there and wink from every corner.
Derrida rejects the confrontation of the tradition with the avant-garde. The contemporary age enables the two poles to collaborate – no more rebellion of the avant-garde against the tradition but coexistence. Yahalom is true to this philosophical view, but in her work she does not discard the visual art for philosophy that would have conceptualized the sculpture. She is devoted to her work, reminding of a craftsman sculptor; she does not order but skillfully carries out her own creation.
One literary character used to say: “children and good pipes one should make by himself” – to which I would add – good sculptures as well.
*The success of the campaign of Christianity was affected, among other things, by the catchy logo – the cross.
Miriam Gamburd