In August, visual artist Keren Cytter will relocate from New York to Wysing for a residency with musicians Keira Fox and Charlie Feinstein of Maria & the Mirrors and David Aird of Vindicatrix. This exciting new collaboration will lead to the production of a new multimedia performance work, Vociferous, including new video and live music, which will be premiered at Wysing’s annual festival Space-Time on the 31st August, and later performed in an expanded version at the ICA London.

As part of her commission Keren Cytter put out a call for found mobile phone footage which will form the main body of the new video work - including weddings, boats, people, holidays, beaches, parties, drinks, families, personal stuff, professional leftovers, anything.

The final work, Vociferous, will depict a fragmented narrative progressively shattered by shifts from video to scripted performance and live music.Over the course of the piece, video constructed from found footage will increasingly overlap with the melodramatic psychedelic drone of Aird and raucous drum driven industrial dancehall of Fox and Feinstein performing live. The viewer’s perspective will shift from witness to the text based performance and video, to the audience of a live concert and member of the performance itself.

The work will be shown for the first time in our annual art and music festival Space-Time: Convention T, Saturday 31 August. Full festival programme here.  

Vociferous is realised in partnership with London’s ICA and is supported by PRS for Music Foundation and The Elephant Trust.

Read Adrian Searle's review of the work at the ICA here.

Keren Cytter (born 1977) creates films; video installations; performance; and drawings that represent social realities through experimental modes of storytelling. Characterised by a non-linear, cyclical logic Cytter’s films consist of multiple layers of images; conversation; monologue, and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, these montages of impressions, memories, and imaginings are poetic and self-referential in composition. The artist creates intensified scenes drawn from everyday life in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production.

Major solo exhibitions of Cytter's work include Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); Project Series: Keren Cytter, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009); Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Huarte (2008); Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin (2008); Stuk Kunstcentrum, Leuven (2007); MUMOK, Vienna (2007).

Recent group exhibitions include On Apology, CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2012); Whistable Biennale (2012); FAX, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2012); The Plot, Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Expanded Cinema, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011); Fare Mondi: 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2009); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009); Television Delivers People, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Manifesta 7, Trentino (2008); and Yokohama Triennial, Yokahama (2008).

Cytter is also the author of three novels: The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (Lukas and Sternberg, New York – Berlin, 2005); The seven most exciting hours of Mr. Trier’s life in twenty-four chapters (Witte de With and Sternberg, Rotterdam-Berlin, 2008), and The Amazing True Story of Moshe Klinberg – A Media Star (onestar, Paris, 2009).