VES 65: Tactics – Art, Politics and Performance
VES 150x: Intermediate Film Production
VES 163: Soft and Hard: Studio Jean-Luc Godard
VES 165: Moving Image – Installation, Production and Spectacle

Berlin Remake, 2005, two-channel installation, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin

Born in 1974 in Chicago, Siegel studied at Bard College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has lived and worked in New York and Berlin. Siegel works variously in 16 and 35 mm film, video, sound, and writing. Screenings and exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial; KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; Austrian Film Museum; Berlin International Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Frankfurt Film Museum; and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books), was published in 1999, followed by numerous essays on art and poetics. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address, and interview, investigating how these repetitions form cultural memory. Her multichannel video and film 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, DDR/DDR) move between scripted and spontaneous spaces, truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement.