Amie Siegel. Part 1. Black Moon
5 July23 October 2011
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Kleiner Schlossplatz 1
70173 Stuttgart
Germany
T +49 (0) 711 / 216 21 88
Twitter: @kunstmuseum
info@kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de
The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart presents Amie Siegel's recent work "Black Moon,"
the
first installment of a two-part exhibition. In spring 2013 Siegel will
return
to the Kunstmuseum to exhibit a new work on film.
Ranging from photographs, video, film installations, and feature films for
the
cinema, Siegel¹s artwork re-orientates the fictions within documentary
practices, often doubling back on history through the specific patterns of
cinematic choreography and architecture. In her multipart works for
exhibition, Siegel takes seemingly disparate filmic elements, often derived
in
part from archives and her own filmed images, and arranges them in an
accumulative constellation, a method of associative montage that, in her
cinema films, unfolds and recurs subtly over time. These gradual gatherings
within and between works suggest montage is a third thing that, as the
artist
has written, "unfolds in us."
The heart of the first part of this double exhibition is the film Black Moon
(2010), shot on super-16mm film and transferred to HD. An enigmatic story
evolves without dialogue, a group of armed women comb through deserted,
unfinished developments of luxury homes&lsqauo;evidence of the US mortgage
crisis&lsqauo;the
landscape alternating as setting and subject of a mysterious and
inexplicable
future war. The women, at times highly styled, go through various
psychological as well as physical stages of an apocalyptic civil war whose
background remains unclear. Siegel draws on stylistic devices traced from
different film genres: science fiction, action, the western. Her original
point of reference is Louis Malle's 1975 film of the same name. Siegel
translates key motifs from Malle¹s surrealist gendered war into a
contemporary
iconography both allusive and uncanny.
These methods of transposition, remake, reenactment and doubling play an
important role in Siegel's body of work, and reverberate in the second
element
of the artwork, Black Moon/Mirrored Malle (2010), a two-channel video
installation. Here a 1975 film interview with Louis Malle concerning his
Black
Moon is confronted with a reconstructed version of the interview. In this
contemporary "documentation" the artist plays the part of the auteur,
discussing "the making of." The fractures produced by the exchange of
gender,
language (English/French) and inverted setting generate the effect of a
mirror
in which the cultural codes of the time become visible.
Siegel links the events of her film with a reflection on the formal aspects
of
the medium, the overlay of fiction and documentation, in the third part of
the
project: Black Moon/Hole Punches (2010). A series of photographs derived
from
the moment when film is transferred to video and the laboratory punches a
hole
into the film negative as a synchronization point, the image later
discarded.
Siegel printed the hole-punched frames from the digital transfer of her
Black
Moon dailies. The dark irregular voids shot through her landscape
photographs
appear as gunshot remnant or threat-ening black moon. They are allegories of
the film's narrative as well as relics of the material basis of the film.
Black Moon screened in the Cannes Film Festival¹s 2011 Semaine de la
Critique.
The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart show is the first museum presentation of the
entire
ensemble of Black Moon works. The double exhibition extends Siegel¹s
concerns
with mirroring and reprise, suggesting a rebounding line of thought between
the two installments of the exhibition over time.
Amie Siegel has exhibited in group shows in North America and Europe
including
The Talent Show, MoMA/PS1, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Another
Point of View, La Galerie, Noisy-le-Sec, France; The Russian Linesman,
Hayward
Gallery, London; 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, and Forum Expanded, Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Her single channel videos and
feature-length films have been shown widely including at the Museum of
Modern
Art, New York; Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, New
York Film Festival, BFI Southbank and the Harvard Film Archive. She has been
a
fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, the Guggenheim Foundation and
the recipient of the ICA Boston¹s 2010 Foster Prize.
Amie Siegel. Part 1: Black Moon is organized by Simone Schimpf, Curator.
Further support provided by Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
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