Amanda Dawn Christie

Biography

Amanda Dawn Christie is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, video, performance, electronics, photography, transmission art, and electroacoustic sound design. She has exhibited and performed in art galleries across Canada, and her films have screened internationally from Cannes to Korea to San Fransisco and beyond. She was the 2014 Atlantic finalist for the National Media Art prize, and had a 10 year retrospective exhibition of her work curated by Mireille Bourgeois, at the Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben Cohen, and was also included in the Marion McCain Biennale of Atlantic Contemporary Art, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi. Since 1997, she has been actively involved with artist run centres, in both volunteer and staff positions: serving on various boards, working as both a technician and later as a director, teaching workshops, publishing articles, and serving on juries across Canada. She completed her MFA at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, before moving to Amsterdam. Upon her return to Canada she worked at the Faucet Media Arts Centre & Struts Gallery in Sackville, NB, while teaching part time at Mount Allison University. She later worked as the director of the Galerie Sans Nom and the RE:FLUX festival of music, while teaching part time at l'Université de Moncton. She left her position directing the GSN in 2014 to dedicate her time to an interactive performance project called Requiem for Radio, which premiered in spring of 2017 with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

She is currently working on a new media transmission art project called Ghosts in the Air Glow with the support of a Canada Council grant, which involves mixing audio and images in the D layer of the earth's ionosphere using the Ionospheric Research Instrument, an array of 180 radio antennas, at the HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) facility in Alaska.

Concepts and themes explored in her work focus primarily on the relationship between the human body and analogue technology in a digital age. She spent the last several years working on various projects related to shortwave radio and the RCI (Radio Canada International) shortwave transmission site. One major body of work related to the RCI towers is called Spectres of Shortwave, and it includes a 2 hour experimental documentary film as well as various accompanying gallery installations. The other major body of work about the RCI shortwave site is called Requiem for Radio, and it includes a one hour interdiscplinary performance with various accompanying installations and performances in five parts. Both Spectres of Shortwave and Requiem for Radio were created with the support of Arts NB and the Canada Council for the Arts. Ghosts in the Air Glow is currently in progress and involves creating audio and image works relating to military and civilian scientific research, surveillance, climate, territory, and communications embedded into radio frequencies transmitted straight into and through the ionosphere to the liminal boundaries of outer space.

View Amanda Christie's CV

Monographs, edited volumes, special issues

Lehrer, Erica and SJ Kerr-Lapsley (eds.) Beyond Museum Walls: Museums and the Academy in Tension and Dialogue. Jagiellonian / Columbia University Press (Exhibiting Theory series), Forthcoming, 2024.

Lehrer, Erica, Roma Sendyka, and Magdalena Waligórska (eds.) “Awkward Objects, Curiosa and Varia: Exploring the Boundaries of the Holocaust Archive”. Special issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Forthcoming, 2024.

Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions. Edited volume with Shelley Butler. McGill-Queens Press, 2016.

Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland. Edited volume with Michael Meng. Indiana University Press, 2015.

Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places. Indiana University Press (“New Anthropologies of Europe” series), 2013. (Finalist, National Jewish Book Award; Honorable Mention, Association of Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award).

Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places. (Eds.) Erica Lehrer, Cynthia Milton, and Monica Patterson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Exhibition catalogs

Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust. With Roma Sendyka, Wojciech Wilczyk, Magdalena Zych. Warsaw: Kritika Polityczna, 2024. (e-book)

Widok zza bliska. Inne obrazy Zagłady. With Roma Sendyka, Wojciech Wilczyk, Magdalena

Zych. Warsaw: Kritika Polityczna, 2023.

My Museum, a Museum about Me: Curatorial Dreams for the Kraków Ethnographic Museum. With Roma Sendyka. Kraków: Jagiellonian / Columbia University Press (Exhibiting Theory series), 2023.

Różnicowanie narodowego “my”: kuratorskie marzenia. With Roma Sendyka. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2019.

Lucky Jews / Na Szczęscie To Żyd. Ha!art Press, Krakow, 2014.

Recent academic articles and chapters

"Unpacking Righteousness: Material Legacies of Aid to Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland." Holocaust and Genocide Studies (special issue on "Awkward Objects, Curiosa and Varia: Exploring the Boundaries of the Holocaust Archive"). Forthcoming, 2024.

"Materialny krewny: wspólnoty uwikłania w postkolonialnych,

postholokaustowych polskich zbiorach etnograficznych". [Polish translation of

"Material Kin: 'Communities of implication' in post-colonial, post-Holocaust

Polish ethnographic collections"]. Prace Kulturoznawcze, Vol. 27, No. 4 ("Peasant

Genealogies", ed. Jan Wasiewicz), Forthcoming, 2024.

"Curatorial Activism: Museums, Memory, Change." Routledge Handbook of

Memory Activism. (Eds.) Yifat Gutman, Kerry Whigham, and Jenny Wüstenberg.

London: Routledge. 2023, 369-375.

"Decolonial Museology in East-Central Europe: A Preliminary To-Do List."

EuropeNow (Columbia University), with Joanna Wawrzyniak, 2023.

"Materiality and Holocaust Memory: Activating and Theorizing Poland’s Unquiet

Places." Jewish Quarterly Review. Forum on the state of the field of Eastern

European Jewish studies. Vol. 112, No. 2 (Spring 2022), 239–244.

"Jewish Figurines and Holocaust Memory: A Meaning-Making Circuit in (and

beyond) the Polish People’s Republic." Diskursbuch Sprachlosigkeit (ed. by

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden),

Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2021.

"Material Kin: 'Communities of implication' in post-colonial, post-Holocaust Polish

ethnographic collections." In (Eds.) Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald,

Across Anthropology: Convergences through Museums, Colonial Legacies, and

the Curatorial. (Leuven University Press), 2020: pp. 283-316.

"Making space for Jewish culture in Polish 'folk' and 'ethnographic' museums:

Curating social diversity after ethnic cleansing."(with Monika Murzyn-Kupisz).

Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, special issue honoring Barbara

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2019, pp. 82-108.

"Arts of Witness or Awkward Objects? Vernacular art as a source base for

'bystander' Holocaust memory in Poland" (with Roma Sendyka). Special issue of

Holocaust Studies: Disputed Holocaust Memory in Poland. (Eds.) Larry Ray and

Sławomir Kapralski." Vol. 25, Issue 3, 2019, pp. 300-328.

"Can there be a Conciliatory Heritage?" International Journal of Heritage Studies.

Vol. 16 (4-5), July-September, 2010: 269-288. (Reprinted in S. Watson, A.

Barnes, and K. Bunning (eds.) A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage.

Leicester Readers in Museum Studies. Routledge: London and New York, 2018).

Museum and Exhibition Reviews

"Making #Heritage Great Again." Political Critique (politicalcritique.org). November 27, 2017.

"Curating Polish Folk." Political Critique (politicalcritique.org). November 18, 2016.

"Thinking Through the Canadian Museum for Human Rights." American Quarterly. Volume 67, Number 4. December 2015. Pgs. 1195-1216.

Translations

Difficult Questions in Polish-Jewish Dialogue: How Poles and Jews See Each Other: A Dialogue on Key Issues in Polish-Jewish Relations. (Eds) Kozłowski, Maciej, Andrzej Folwarczny, Michał. Bilewicz, Forum Dialogu Między Narodami, and American Jewish Committee. Warszawa: Jacek Santorski & Co Agencja Wydawnicza, 2006. (Translated from Polish to English).