ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, is excited to present the premiere of The Silence (2022), a new moving image installation by Amie Siegel. The artist’s new commission will be on view from 3 June to 30 October, 2022.
A double video projection composed of two alternating segments—each performed and filmed in two churches designed by Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1885 – 1975) late in his life: St. Mark’s (Stockholm), and St. Peter’s (Klippan)—The Silence considers the relationship between architecture, music, sound, and the immaterial.
The Silence behaves much like a vinyl album—each ‘side’, or video projection, performs a musical score the artist adapted from the unique brick-patterned walls of the churches and had played on the unique organs Lewerentz designed for each space. The uncanny similarity Siegel draws between Lewerentz’s graphic brickwork and player piano scores—paper rolls dotted with patterns of small, perforated absences that generate ghostly “self-playing” music—here alludes to the larger existential questions of presence and absence, sound and silence, that often guide or contravene spiritual life, and thus imbue ‘The Church’ as a unique architectural space wherein such inquiries take shape.
Amie Siegel
Amie Siegel’s (b. 1974, Chicago, USA) complex, multi-layered works often reveal new meanings in narrativizing systems of power and economic structures while examining the very aesthetics and mechanisms of image and sound production. The artist’s current and recent exhibitions include Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2022); 34th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2021); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017), Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016) and Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016). Siegel has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation and a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. She lives and works in New York City.
Amie Siegel
The Silence (2022)
3 June – 30 October 2022 ArkDes – the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design
Exercisplan 4
Skeppsholmen
StockholmFriday, 3 June 2022:
17.00 Amie Siegel in conversation with Theodor Ringborg, Artistic Director, Bonniers Konsthall
18.00 Welcome, Kieran Long, Director, ArkDesEvents are free and open to the public.
