DDR/DDR

Amie Siegel

Amie Siegel, DDR/DDR, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York.

Amie Siegel’s DDR/DDR (2008) is a feature-length visual essay that excavates the surveillance technologies, architectures, and psychological aftermaths of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (1949–1990). The film interweaves contemporary interview footage and cinematic tableaus that glide through the stark interior and exterior landscapes of Modernist East Germany with archival visual samples gleaned from disguised micro-cameras, indexing the espionage culture of their production. Siegel’s deeply associative technique traces the physical and psychic residues of a regime marked by its extensive state-sanctioned surveillance industry whilst undertaking another, self-reflexive inspection of the documentary form, its implicit surveillance, and performances of authority and objectivity.

The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Professor Laura Bradley, Chair of German and Theatre at the University of Edinburgh and a specialist in the cultural legacy of the GDR.

Amie Siegel works variously between film, photography, performance and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include the South London Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Audain Gallery, Simon Frasier University, Vancouver, B.C.; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and the MAK, Vienna. The artist has participated in group exhibitions at Witte de With, Rotterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Hayward Gallery, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; MoMA PS1; MAXXI Museum, Rome; Swiss Institute, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She lives and works in New York City.

Professor Laura Bradley is Chair of German and Theatre at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961-1989 (OUP, 2010) and Brecht and Political Theatre: ‘The Mother’ on Stage (OUP, 2006), and she co-edited the volume Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity with Karen Leeder (Camden House, 2011). Laura’s research has been used to create new drama and film about the GDR through her work with playwright Peter Arnott and film-maker Susan Kemp, supported by the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland.

Transit Arts is an itinerant organisation for the exhibition of artists’ moving image, working through public screening programmes and experimental publishing. This screening is part of ‘Uncanny Loop’, an anthology series that connects the contemporary urban experience with the Gothic mode and historical conceptions of ‘the uncanny’.

This screening event is part of the RFN Scotland 6818 festival and is supported by Goethe-Institut Glasgow. As part of the festival, Transit Arts also presents the group screening How to Thrive, Sunday 27 May, 7pm at the CCA Glasgow.

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Programme

︎Amie Siegel, DDR/DDR, 2008. HD video, 135 min.