„In October 2021 I was in Bakhmut, Ukraine, at the invitation of Mykola Ridnyi and Dana Brezhinieva, to open an exhibition at the local historical museum which included my video work "P.O.V" (2016).
In this work I prepared, analyzed, and commented on the film footage taken, among others, in Bakhmut, then Artemovsk, by the Wehrmacht officer von Vietinghoff-Riesch in the winter of 1941/1942. Artemovsk (Bakhmut) was occupied by the Wehrmacht from 1941 -1943. The front passed through the town twice, and it was immensely destroyed by the Germans, war crimes and mass murders were committed.
The blowing up of the monumental avant-garde sculpture of Artyom in 1943, a work of sculptor Kavaleridze on the central square, was symbolic; we were looking for its former location. (The monument was dedicated to the Bolshevik revolutionary Fjordor Sergeyev, known as „Artem“ after whom the city was named in 1924). We walked together through the town and I imagined locations where the cameraman could have filmed with his 16mm camera.
Here I show the raw footage from Bakhmut as a sighting of the town between three different times, now being destroyed again, by the Russian war of aggression.“ (Clemens von Wedemeyer)
Clemens von Wedemeyer (*1974 Göttingen) currently lives and works in Berlin and teaches media art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. He studied photography and media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld and the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. The German artist and filmmaker has participated in various group shows such as the 1st Moscow Biennale, the 4th Berlin Biennale, Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, and dOCUMENTA (13). He has also had solo shows at notable institutions such as MoMA PS1 in New York, ARGOS Centre for Art and Media in Brussels, the Barbican Art Centre in London, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. His film "ESIOD 2015" premiered at the 66th International Film Festival Berlin (Berlinale) in 2016.
