DDR/DDR
An Evening with Amie Siegel
Sponsored by Film & Digital Media, Cowell College, Porter College, and History of Art and Visual Culture.
This recent film by Amie Siegel is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful film essay on the German Democratic Republic and its dissolution, which left many of its former citizens adrift in their newfound freedom. Featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the film collects unsettlingly mundane Stasi surveillance footage, interviews with psychoanalysts, East German “Indian hobbyists,” and lolling shots of derelict state radio stations into an extended and self-conscious assemblage that weaves together meditations on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art. Siegel’s ‘ciné-constellation’ combines vérité interviews with staged dialogue to excavate East German traumas associated with both the Socialist state and reunification.
Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound, and writing. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address, and interview to consider how these repetitions shape cultural memory. In multi-channel video and film installations, Siegel reformulates cinematic enterprises–including the establishing shot, the remake, and the tracking shot–as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation, and nostalgia. Longer videos and feature films move between spontaneous and scripted spaces, truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement. Exhibitions and screenings include The Talent Show, Walker Art Center; Auto-Kino! Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin; The Russian Linesman, The Hayward, London; 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; Forum Expanded, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Berlin International Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; BFI Southbank; Frankfurt Film Museum, and Film Forum in New York. Siegel has been a guest artist of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, the Fulton Fellow in Non-Fiction Filmmaking at the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
This event is free and open to the public.