Thursday, February 26, 2009, 6pm | Director Amie Siegel in person!
- DDR/DDR (Amie Siegel, 2008). Image courtesy of the artist.
The latest feature by artist, filmmaker, and SAIC alum Amie Siegel (Empathy, 2003) is a multi-layered and disarmingly beautiful 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, DDR/DDR weaves together 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 to meditate on history, memory, and the shared technologies of state control and art. 2008, Amie Siegel, Germany/USA, HDCAM video, 135 min.
Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Born in Chicago, she currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. She received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions and screenings include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, “The Russian Linesman,” Hayward Gallery, London; “Forum Expanded,” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, BFI Southbank, London; Frankfurt Film Museum and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA) was published in 1999. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
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