Clemens von Wedemeyer, Getrennter Monolog (Divided Monologue), 2007, Slideshow, 80 slides.
Clemens von Wedemeyer, The Inner Campus, 2008, 2 x 55 min dual screen installation.
Clemens von Wedemeyer, The Inner Campus, 2008, 2 x 55 min dual screen installation.
Clemens von Wedemeyer, The Fourth Wall.
Clemens von Wedemeyer, The Fourth Wall.
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Barbican Centre
Silk Street
020 7638 4141
London
The Curve
Clemens von Wedemeyer
The Fourth Wall
May 29-August 30, 2009
The Fourth Wall, German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer’s first solo show in the UK, is an ambitious film-based installation which revolves around first encounters between two groups of different people: in anthropological terms referred to as "first contacts."
As the title suggests, von Wedemeyer’s work also explores the notion of the "fourth wall," the imaginary divide in theatre which allows the audience to believe that what they see is real, whilst simultaneously enabling the actors to disregard the presence of the audience. Here, the "fourth wall" is compared, metaphorically, to an imaginary wall which divides different groups of people, until the moment of their "first contact." As von Wedemeyer’s piece develops, the concept of the "fourth wall" is investigated in a series of eight interrelated films, many of which are staged and shot in locations around the Barbican Centre. These individual films merge to create a meditation on authenticity, fabrication and belief.
The starting point of von Wedemeyer’s narrative is the Philippine group of the Tasaday who were allegedly first ‘discovered’ in the rain forests of Mindanao by Western explorers in 1971. The small group became an instant news story: an extraordinary people living a life untouched by contact with other civilisations, and unchanged since the Stone Age. By the 1980s they were to receive renewed international press attention when anthropologists and journalists declared that the Tasaday had, in fact, been perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Had these 27 people been acting on the world stage all along?
In von Wedemeyer’s fiction, protagonists of a play staged at the Barbican Theatre are inspired by the Tasaday. Further film fragments, set in a Barbican apartment, the Conservatory and highwalks, explore the theme of "first contact:" first contact between civilisations, between the actors and their audience after the play’s premiere, and between an explorer and an undiscovered group. The films shot by von Wedemeyer are interconnected with documentary footage and interviews which combine to create a narrative that addresses how societies regard one other, and how they approach the unknown. As the story unfolds through the gallery space, the distinctions between reality and fiction becomes ever more blurred and the "fourth wall," that invisible line between belief and disbelief, is challenged.
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in Göttingen, Germany in1974 and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has won several international awards for his short films, video works and installations, including the Böttcherstrasse Art Award (2005) and the VG Bildkunst Award for Experimental Film (2002). Von Wedemeyer has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe and America. Group shows include Skulptur Projekte Münster, Germany 2007; the 4th Berlin Biennial, Germany 2006; the 1st Moscow Biennial, Russia 2005 and the Turin Triennial, Italy 2005.
German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer constructs installations that inhabit a space between cinema, documentary and the fine arts, incorporating references to cinema classics as well as social comment and historical events. Fascinated by cinema, but working outside of cinematic norms and linear storylines, von Wedemeyer presents sequences, situations and images, utilising references to films and lighting strategies to produce striking displacements of time and space. In Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion) (2005), a dancer appears and disappears from view, avoiding the camera’s gaze by waiting quietly, face to the wall. The dancer is the choreographer and performer Alexandre Roccoli, and the footage was shot during rehearsals for a solo piece in Villa Gillet, Lyon, France. Von Wedemeyer alters the reality of the time sequence and sets the scene to music, exploring the relationship between body, space and camera, and turning documentary into fiction by the camera’s reconstruction.
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1974. He studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts of Leipzig (prof. Astrid Klein).
He lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig, Germany. |
