Amie Siegel will present a central element of her new cinematic work, PROVENANCE, which premiered recently at the Simon Preston Gallery in New York.

A discussion of this piece will follow with a group of New School faculty including: Brian McGrath (Professor and Dean of the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons), Victoria Hattam (Professor of Politics, New School for Social Research), Vyjayanthi Rao (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, New School for Social Research) and Anthony Aziz (Associate Professor of Fine Arts and Program Director of BFA Fine Arts, Parsons). 

Seating is limited so please arrive early.

Thursday, November 7^th at 6pm-8pm
Glass Corner Lecture room, 2nd floor
25 East 13th Street

This event is being co-sponsored by
AMT/Fine Arts
SCE
NSSR/Politics + Anthropology
India-China Institute

Provenance, 2013
HD video, color, sound, 40′ 30″
Exhibition view Simon Preston Gallery
New York

PROVENANCE tracks backwards the origins and economic movements of cultural objects. Characteristic of the artist’s layered approach, the work self-reflexively takes on the behaviors of the system it describes.

The constellation of works circles around the global trade in furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh. Conceived in the 1950s by architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Chandigarh’s controversial modernist architecture includes original pieces of furniture -tables, chairs, settees, desks created specifically for the building’s interiors. Recently these pieces have appeared at auction houses around the world, commanding record prices.

A film work shown at cinematic scale, Provenance (2013) traces the furniture’s odyssey in reverse. Starting with the Chandigarh furniture in the present, the film begins in New York apartments, London townhouses, Belgian villas and Paris salons of avid collectors. From there, it moves backwards to the furniture’s sale at auction, preview exhibitions, and photography for auction catalogues, to restoration, cargo shipping containers, and Indian ports–ending finally in Chandigarh, a city in a state of entropy.

Juxtaposing contemplative tracking shots, precise framing, and recurrent tableaux the film enacts a subtly discursive cinematic space, peeling back time to make visible the furniture’s movement around the globe. This accumulative montage exposes the circuits of ownership and history that influence the furniture’s fluctuating value.

Bio:

Amie Siegel was born in 1974 in Chicago, USA. Her work has been exhibited internationally at MoMA/PS1, Walker Art Center, Hayward Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, KW Berlin, ICA Boston and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Screenings include Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, New York Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Harvard Film Archive among many other museums and cinematheques. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, the Guggenheim Foundation, and The Film Study Center at Harvard University, as well as a recipient of the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize and, most recently, a Sundance Institute Film Fund award for Provenance.