Images and written or spoken texts encounter one another asynchronously in Keren Cytter’s films, accompanied by music, and give the impression of revolving around a certain content. In most cases psychological themes can be linked with the various figures. Yet it remains uncertain whether the film itself dictates these associations or they are evoked by the viewers’ imaginations, and this vagueness accounts for the rather eerie mood. The virtual “staging” of the protagonists is reminiscent of theatre. At the same time, with abrupt transitions, camera work, cross-fading and obvious use of found footage, the film medium also loudly calls attention to itself. Born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and now living in New York, the artist also orchestrates performances that take place directly in front of an audience. Solo exhibitions of her works have been presented by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Mumok, Vienna, and the Tate Modern, London.

Neil Beloufa was born in Paris in 1985 and studied in Paris, New York and Valencia from 2004 to 2009. His video Kempinski (2007) won numerous prizes, for example at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2008. This early video piece already anticipates his interest in ethnographic observations, science fiction and the analysis of present-day society. In Neil Beloufa’s artistic work, video is increasingly present as an installation element reflecting a spatial dimension that comes to bear simultaneously in the videos themselves: in a landscape immersed in nocturnal black, as in Kempinski, or in the Futurist glass architecture of a so-called Corporate City uniting work and life in the video People’s passion, lifestyle, beautiful wine, gigantic glass towers, all surrounded by water of 2011. Neil Beloufa has had exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Kunstraum Innsbruck.

Contrary to claims of linear narrative forms, the fragment and the fragmentary have been on the menus of post-modern discourses since the 1980s. James Richards (b. 1983) assembles his films from found footage and image data taken from the Internet. As opposed to mere conglomeration, his work results in incommensurability – compositions made of ingredients that, in and of themselves, isolated from the narrative stream, represent archetypes richly furnished with emotion. By exposing the manifold levels and layers of images, he also liberates those images from the ideology of their original medium and elicits ambiguous effects from them. A native of Wales now living in Berlin, the artist has had exhibitions at the Friedericianum in Kassel (2013–14), the Chisenhale Gallery (2011) the Tate Britain in London (2010), the New Museum in New York (2009) and elsewhere.

Eastern European immigrants in New York, Sinti and Roma in Paris, the occupants of a house in Bangkok slated for demolition – these are the protagonists of Bertille Bak’s films. They are presented not so much as individuals, but as part of a social minority existing within an overwhelmingly powerful capitalist system from which they are excluded. Before their home is demolished, the Thai tenants use flashlights to perform the score of a revolutionary song – which Bak has transposed into a sequence of light signals – on the balconies of their flats. The silent song is a symbol of their inability to defend themselves audibly against the building’s demolition. Born in Arras, France in 1983, the artist lives and works in Paris. Her work has been presented at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Palais du Tokyo, the Bielefeld Kunstverein, and within the framework of the Paris Triennale.

Everyday situations or objects often form the basis of Nevin Aladağ’s works. The artist is interested in the peculiarities of cultural imprint as conveyed by the history, material and origins of objects. Musical instruments of various cultures, for example, are “played” in her films by natural forces such as wind or rain. Born in Turkey in 1972, Aladağ studied at the Munich art academy and has lived in Berlin since 2002. Her works have been exhibited at a wide range of venues including the Sharjah Biennial (2013), the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011), The Hayward Gallery, London (2010) and the 11th International Istanbul Biennial (2009), and are on view this summer at the Kunsthalle Basel.

Since the early nineties, the German-Norwegian artist Bjørn Melhus has been investigating the influence of cinema and television in his works. With devices such as filmic quotations and repeated stagings, deliberate exaggerations and omissions in seemingly well-known film material, he creates threatening “doubles”. His stories, in which he himself plays all of the roles, oscillate between creepy fairy tales and the grotesque. It is not his own identity that forms the focus of his works, but the boundary between the self and the media world. Bjørn Melhus has been teaching at the Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2003. His films and film installations have been featured at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Sprengelmuseum in Hanover and elsewhere.