Amie Siegel

Born 1974 in Chicago, Illinois/USA.

The American artist and filmmaker studied at Bard College and at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in New York and Berlin. 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 (film) gaze, direct address and interview, investigating how these repetitions form cultural memory. Her multi-channel video installations reformulate cinematic enterprises – the establishing shot, the remake and the tracking shot – as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia.

Longer single-channel videos and films (»The Sleepers«, »Empathy«) move between scripted and spontaneous spaces; truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement.

Screenings and exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, KW – Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Austrian Film Museum, Berlin International Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Film Forum in New York.

She is the author of numerous essays and a book of poetry, »The Waking Life«, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA (1999).

Siegel has been an artist in residence of the German Academic Exchange (DAAD) Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, the Edith Ruß Site for Media Art, Oldenburg and is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.