Amie Siegel: Part 2. Ricochet

Amie Siegel frequently works with methods of transference, repetition, and doubling. Often treating cinema as a musical score, or performance script, the American artist raises questions about the economies of authorship and gender roles as well as the relationship between objects, cinematographic and architectonic space. These themes are at the core of her two-part exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. In the first part, in 2011, Siegel’s multi-element film, video installation, and photographic work Black Moon emerged from a condensation of Louis Malle’s film of the same name. In the second part, Siegel extends these topics through a constellation of new pieces, making subtle reference at the same time to her own previous show.

As the exhibition’s title, Ricochet, suggests, Siegel has created a network of references in which relationships are simultaneously established and collided. Working in different media ranging from works on paper to video installation and performance, Siegel takes Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris/Contempt and focuses on the film’s main location, Villa Malaparte, on Capri, and the figure of the female protagonist, Camille, played by Brigitte Bardot.

The series “Body Scripts” (2015) consists of thirty-four framed works on paper, pages from the English translation of Alberto Moravia’s novel Il desprezzo (The Ghost at Noon), which served as the basis for Godard’s film. Siegel selected only pages of the narrative that focus on the female protagonist. The passages are further highlighted, as the artist has overpainted the remaining sentences, producing monochrome blocks whose geometry recalls architectural floor plans. Whereas Siegel emphasizes the main character in “Body Scripts,” in the multi-channel video installation The Noon Complex (2016) she reverses her approach, digitally removing Bardot from key scenes of Godard’s film. As a result the space—Villa Malaparte—is underscored, whereby the tracking shots, directed at a now absent actor, lend the sequences an uncanny quality. Doubling this feeling, Siegel poses an actor as Bardot on an adjacent screen in a neutral environment, emphasizing her physical presence. The traced movements of the actor are experienced twice, against the film’s two different soundtracks—French and Italian—the scenes thus oscillating from melancholy drama to farce, a set-up Siegel also directs in a live performance at the opening.

The relationship between the body and its space is furthered in the slide projection Surrogates (2016), which shows photographs of places of rupture and repair on the bodies of classical sculptures in the Naples National Archaeological Museum near Capri while the film Fetish (2016) depicts the yearly cleaning of the psychoanalyst’s collection of ritual statues at the Freud Museum in London. The film Genealogies (2016) finally reveals the artist’s associative thinking by combining novels, films, images, advertising and soundtrack from multiple sources into a baroque invocation of image and artwork provenance, remake and copy.

Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago) works variously in photography, video, film, performance and feature films for the cinema. Her work has been the subject of recent and upcoming solo exhibitions including Amie Siegel: Provenance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Amie Siegel: Double Negative at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; KW Institute for Contemporay Art, Berlin; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; MoMA PS1, New York; MAXXI Museum, Rome; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and New York Film Festivals; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her work is in public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation, a recipient of the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize, a 2012 Sundance Institute award, the 2014 Berlinale Forum Expanded award, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award.

Amie Siegel. Part 2. Ricochet is organized by Sven Beckstette, Curator.

Support for this group of works came from the research project ¡REMEDIATE!, initiated by the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Merz Akademie in cooperation with the MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg and the Landesanstalt für Kommunikation (LFK). Further support was provided by The Princess Grace Foundation, New York and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.