In most cases Berlin based artist Keren Cytter stages here films using simple means in settings of her own social background. Her apartment or the kitchen of acquaintances function as location, non-professional actors and friends often play the leading roles in Cytter’s mini dramas. Her stories dealing with love can be very emotional especially when she imitates soap operas as well as grim when murder and violence come into play. Cytter who was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv refuses any straight forward narrative. Instead she sees montage, sound and sub titles as experimental tools with which gender stereotypes, clichéd patterns in relationships or conventional images in movies and television films can be broken up. The works themselves are furthermore characterized by subtle humor and a feeling of déjá vu as single scenes which seem almost identical are generally presented as never ending loops. This aesthetic is also typical for Cytters non filmic work which consists of scripts for Dance Theater, novels, short stories and large scale drawings.For the upcoming issue of Texte zur Kunst, we are pleased to offer a new film by Keren Cytter as an artists’ edition. In “video-art: A manual” she undermines the relationship between actors, setting and camera as typical for her handling of the medium film. Thematically the approximately 15 minutes feature will focus on the history of video art. Instead of offering a historical analysis of the medium and its development in the last forty years Cytter focuses on the conditions of how contemporary video art will be produced, installed and consumed. By doing this her edition can literally be seen as a manual to her own work.