Container ships, infrastructures of the digital economy, mines, and cityscapes of contemporary California are brought together in an associative montage that expands through the soundtrack of improvisational musician Zsolt Sorés. In a film without dialogue, landscape images and music produce a raw and psychedelic anti-effect, in which musical delays reflect on the surfaces of the images and support the montage: individuals are networked, but Silicon Valley’s digital enterprises are inaccessible, public space is closed off by smart fences.
Biography
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in Göttingen, Germany, currently lives and works in Berlin and holds a professorship for media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The artist and filmmaker studied photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and graduated as Meisterschüler of Astrid Klein in 2005. He creates films and media installations poised between reality and fiction, reflecting power structures in social relations, history and architecture. For over a decade, von Wedemeyer’s films and film installations have explored ideas of utopia and dystopia in the built environment. Again and again the filmmaker holds up architecture as a kind of socio-political mirror to the people it shelters, employs, or turns out, while deftly exploiting the advantageous atmospherics that both modernist ruins and postmodernist edifices reliably provide. He participated in group shows such as the 1st Moscow Biennale (2005), the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006), Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) and dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). He had solo shows among others at MoMA PS1, New York, ARGOS Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, the Barbican Art Centre, London. “ESIOD 2015 premiered at the 66. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Berlinale) in 2016.
Most recently Wendemeyer´s work has been displayed in solo exhibitions such as Im Kontext der Sammlung: Clemens von Wendemeyer (Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz 2023) and BAKHMUT (Albertinum Dresden 2023).