Amie Siegel: Double Negative

The Museum Villa Stuck is pleased to present Amie Siegel: Double Negative, the first large-scale exhibition of American artist Amie Siegel, establishing correspondences between seven of the artist’s works spanning a decade (2005–15) and including a newly commissioned film installation that gives the exhibition its title.

Known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, image-making and methods of observation, Siegel’s work moves between film, video, photography, performance and installation. The artist’s particular attention to the past, and the unfolding of time, provides the starting point for the exhibition’s structure: a series of “ritornellos,” reflexive passages of repetition and difference—Siegel, to quote Deleuze, “makes, remakes and unmakes” her works “along a moving horizon from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them.”

The new commission Double Negative (2015) proposes ruptures between original and remake, artefact and copy, collection and preservation. Two 16mm films simultaneously project images of Le Corbusier’s iconic white Villa Savoye outside Paris, and its doppelgänger, a black copy located in Canberra, Australia. Each film has been printed on 16mm stock as a negative image, or polarity print, thus reversing light and dark. The Antipodean black Villa Savoye is, in fact, an ethnographic institute, dedicated now to the digital duplication of its extensive collections of anthropological films, photographs, slides and sound recordings, as Siegel reveals in a high definition colour video. The work enacts the infinite loop of recorded artefacts—the urgency to document and record “vanishing” rituals and cultural practices becomes instead the contemporary archival impulse to copy vanishing media formats to digital. These concatenated elements extend the artist’s engagement with architecture as a foil, enacting and revealing across constellation-like works, layered sociological and aesthetic concerns.

Central to the exhibition is Siegel’s multi-element film work, Provenance (2013), tracing, in reverse, the global trade in modernist furniture from Chandigarh, India—moving from wealthy collector’s homes to auctions, restoration and shipping, back to the furniture’s origins in Le Corbusier’s controversial planned city. Proof (Christie’s 19 October, 2013) and the video Lot 248 (2013) depict the sale of Provenance at a Christie’s London auction, revealing the work itself as part of the speculative circuit of art and capital it depicts.

Traversing a series of mirrored spaces, the works in the exhibition suggest a critical empathy with place, objects, and cinematic tropes. In Siegel’s celebrated early work Berlin Remake (2005), exterior scenes from East German films move alongside their “remade” version in the present, creating uncanny architectures of presence and absence; Deathstar/Todesstern (2006) juxtaposes eerily slow traveling shots down the hallways of early German modernist buildings; The Modernists (2010) provokes a more intimate and gendered archive—photographic prints and a video cross-cut a single collection of tourist snapshots and super-8 films, the husband posing his wife before modernist sculpture the world over; and Circuit (2013)—a backwards 360-degree tracking shot in Chandigarh’s Natural History Museum—follows the display of planetary evolution in the cyclorama’s round architecture, simultaneously mirroring the reverse timeline of Provenance.

The RICOCHET exhibition series establishes a dialogue between the works of contemporary artists and the historical spaces of the Villa Stuck, maintaining the museum’s spirit as a centre for artistic production. Earlier iterations include exhibitions by Anna Barriball, Hito Steyerl and Ahmet Öğüt. Curated by Madrid-based curator Yara Sonseca Mas, Amie Siegel: Double Negative is the tenth instalment of RICOCHET.

About the artist
Amie Siegel is an artist based in New York. Current solo exhibitions include Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; and Amie Siegel. Part 2. Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. This spring her work is also featured on Vdrome; in the Glasgow International; Fade in: INT. Art Gallery- Day, Swiss Institute, New York; Beyond 2 Degrees, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California; and The Future is a Do-Over, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand. Recent solo exhibitions include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the MAK, Vienna. She is the author of two recent artist books including CATALOGUE (2014, Inventory Press, New York) and Love Letters (2015, Spector Books, Leipzig).

Related program
Artist talk: March 11, 8pm, Yara Sonseca Mas in conversation with Amie Siegel
Film screening: April 14, 7pm, DDR/DDR (2008), Amie Siegel, 135 minutes, color/sound, Filmmuseum München

Publication
A bilingual catalogue will accompany the exhibition featuring essays by Yara Sonseca Mas, Manuel Cirauqui, and a conversation between the artist and Michael Taussig. Designed by Carvalho Bernau, the book will be published and internationally distributed by Mousse.

FRIDAY LATE, first friday every month, 11am to 10pm, free entrance from 6 to 10pm

Press contact
Museum Villa Stuck, T +49 89 45 55 51 12 / presse.villastuck [​at​] muenchen.de