Gallery Raffaella Cortese is pleased to announce the show Continental Break, an unseen joint project by Keren Cytter and Nora Schultz. This exhibition is the third one Keren Cytter presents in the gallery while it is the first time Nora Schultz works in these spaces.

After several years of friendship and collaborations, the two artists decided to develop, for the first time ever, a collective project that merges their artistic research. Reality and fiction blend in their work in such a deep way that it is impossible to discern one from the other, creating a new reality in which the viewers recognize moments of their own lives.

Keren Cytter’s films, video installations and drawings represent our social reality through experimental narrative modes. The artist expresses herself through video installations in an innovative and meaningful way thanks to the use of a dreamlike, ironic and puzzling language. Her works are as fascinating as confusing, carrying the viewers through a world of broken reflections and overwhelming yet deeply realistic actions.

Nora Schultz too develops her works starting from daily life, even in the choice of the materials, and prefers ready-made objects-including window blinds like in the show-taking their usual function off. Nora Schultz creates a change of context, not only with the intention of alienation, but also as an extension of the interpretation possibilities.

One of the two videos by Keren Cytter is showed in the centre of the space n.7 and projected onto a reflective material, scattering lights and colours into the environment. The four-handed drawings display the shapes of the continents with synthetic and playful features but at the same time immediately recognizable by our visual memory. These works-also realized on a reflective paper-absorb the video light and reflect it out again, creating reflections in the space that hit hanging sculptures in an endless game of lights and shades. In the back of the room some curtains painted by the artists close off a small portion of the space from which the audio of Keren Cytter’s second video invites us to enter. This is projected onto a structure designed and built by Nora Schultz; its uneven and sharp surface plays with the images of the video, shattering and puzzling them, almost giving a visual image to Keren Cytter’s narrative.

The space n.4 will feature the important work MOP (Museum of Photography), an archive made up of 800 Polaroids taken with a Polaroid 1200i by Keren Cytter during her travels to Berlin, London, the USA and Israel in 2012 and 2013. People, objects, places, means of transport, houses, hotels and food are shown us as exhibits of a daily life fully and deeply lived among travels, work, relationships and all the other aspects of our lives, told through images, glimpses of meaningful moments.

Nora Schultz works in the space n.1 in a minimal way featuring the Sci-fi-interview drawings and the Tripod sculpture, placed in the middle of the hall. All these works tell a suspended, unrealistic and passionate story without a linear tale but with a broken, enigmatic, ironic and engaging narration, as in Keren Cytter’s video works and MOP. The Tripod becomes a living creature, able to move and escape from the exhibition space, while the drawings are maps of these unlikely paths.