Artist:
Amie Siegel (born 1974 in Chicago, IL, USA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA).

Materials:
HD video, color, sound; 40 minutes.

Description:
“A film work of cinematic scale, Provenance traces in reverse 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. 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.”
—”Provenance,” Amie Siegel website.

“Stylish aesthetics and fashionable conceptualism trump documentary realism in Provenance, an extremely suave film by Amie Siegel. The 40-minute movie is an instance of institutional critique, an art genre that tries to expose and subvert the workings of the capitalist art market. Specifically, it’s about the trade in furniture produced for Chandigarh, the utopian city in northern India whose master plan was conceived by Le Corbusier and his team and built between 1951 and 1965.”
—Ken Johnson, “Amie Siegel: ‘Provenance,” The New York Times, September 4, 2014.