ART-PRESENTATION: Amie Siegel-Winter
Working variously across film, video, performance, photography, and sound, Amie Siegel exposes and connects multiple strata of meaning in her meticulously crafted installations. While narratives operate as sites, artifacts and documents emerge as material tokens of memory, desire, and fact, confronting film with the circumstances and protocols of its own making. Siegel has always understood that the language of film, in its general sense, consists of culturally codified practices, systems that are endlessly repeated.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive
The European premier of Amie Siegel’s film ”Winter” (2013) is on show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Originally commissioned for the 2013 Auckland Triennial, “Winter” is an open-ended work that changes in each location it is exhibited. Originally shot in 2013 in New Zealand, the film is alternately screened with live performance accompaniment and with a recorded soundtrack. Reflecting on the essential elements of filmmaking, and the role of time in production as addressed in this film Siegel has declared: “Winter is a film of multiple tenses – shot in the recent past, depicting an unknown future, unfolding and changing in the present of the exhibition, the film enacts various temporal and cultural conditions of un-fixity and instability, hinting at concerns of global warming and nuclear accidents, and unhinging the fixed nature of cinema and the photographic image”. Shot on location in white-washed, biomorphic dwellings designed by the late architect Ian Athfield in remote areas of New Zealand, the film depicts the life of a community that seems to exist as the last human settlement on Earth. Possible aftermaths of a nuclear war or an environmental catastrophe are evoked in the characters’ contemplation of their deserted surroundings or the relics of a disappeared society. Architecture and props appear simultaneously futuristic and relegated to the past. Birds, particularly, seem to play a special part in the survivors’ longing. As the familiarity of depicted places and objects reinforces their ambiguous eeriness, the film’s soundtrack emerges as the key to establishing their potential meaning. Siegel collaborates with local performers for each exhibition of “Winter”, interrogating the work’s relation to its locus and resituating the viewing within a nomadic production set. The sound track is performed live in the gallery, and changes daily. The exhibition space, in addition to the looping projection of the film, includes a voice-over booth for narration & dialogue over-dubbing, an area for musical performance and sound effects technicians, and a mixing table. Performances alternate between passages of music, appropriated film score, laptop electronic sound, voice-over texts and ADR dialogue on a timed schedule. Alternating between playback and live performance, this presentation of “Winter” allows visitors to experience, on a regular basis, the gallery as a space of active, creative production.
Info: Curator: Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Bilbao, Abandoibarra et.2, Bilbao, Duration: 23/11/17-11/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus
