Vartai gallery - In Lethal Understanding & Killing Time Machine

doviv (36)in #art • 7 years ago

Vartai gallery is pleased to announce the solo show Killing Time Machine by Israeli artist Keren Cytter who currently lives and works in New York. The artist is showing a selection of drawings and video installations in which she employs experimental filmmaking techniques and a range of contexts from theatre, literature, soap operas and YouTube videos in order to focus on everyday life and coexisting social realities.

Keren Cytter creates small cracks in the constantly changing yet stable structures of creative practices and forms of communication. The artist uses techniques such as double exposures, circular loops, subtitling, close-ups and fractured, non-linear narratives that are used by non-professional actors. Such deviations from the norm add speculative, fantasy-like elements to the films and precisely for that reason provoke one to think about what is real in everyday social encounters and everyday contemporary art.

With the addition of constantly changing rhythms of sounds, images and situations the artist shows us intensified scenes of everyday life. They create a certain impression of familiarity, an impression which is mixed up with or takes a turn in the direction of demonstratively fictitious and absurd situations. In this way, Cytter maintains the tension between the real and artificial, while at the same time investigating social, political and gender constructions. The artist makes no attempt to make a direct impact, but in spite of that what she does works like another drop in the water - the liquid stays the same, but the waves in one way or another rise and fall.

Vytautas Viržbickas’s imagination is an endangered species – like fairy tales, heroic deeds and people without mobile phones. Metaphorical, literary and independent thought, it would seem, could lead straight to abstraction but instead it gives birth to concrete and unwieldy visual chimeras. Routine pessimism becomes a sad fable, told in the voice of a citizen watching TV. Illustration, kitsch, never mind those epithets – it’s aesthetics which refuses to be relevant while it is trying to not drown, quench its thirst and save itself in any other way, taking care to keep its oily hands off a guest’s suit.