THE REPETITION FESTIVAL SHOW

Clemens von Wedemeyer’
The Repetition Festival Show brings together four of Clemens von Wedemeyer’’s most celebrated film installations for the first time in Ireland. Occupation (2002), Otjesd (2005), From the Opposite Side (2007), and a selection of artworks from ‘The Fourth Wall’, including Against Death (2009), will be presented in one gallery space, to create a gallery installation which is both film festival and video installation in one.
This rich body of work highlights some of the recurring subjects and forms in his films and installations, while also declaring the breadth and diversity of his practice through the constant evolution of artworks.
25 Nov – 11 Dec: Occupation, 2002 / The Making of Occupation, 2002
13 Dec – 8 Jan: Otjesd (Leaving), 2005 /The Making of Otjesd, 2005
10 Jan – 29 Jan: Against Death, 2009 / Interview, 2009 / Found Footage, 2009
31 Jan – 19 Feb: From the Opposite Side, 2007
For this solo exhibition a different film installation from von Wedemeyer will open every three weeks in the gallery.  Emerging out of the artworks themselves, the concept for this exhibition festival draws on the constantly revolving scenarios we see in von Wedemeyer’s films as they loop temporally, physically and narratively within the space.
The Repetition Festival Show is curated by Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Art at Project Arts Centre, and the guide is co-produced with Fondazione Galleria Civica, Research Center on Contemporaneity, Trento (to whom the exhibition will travel to in summer 2011.)
The Repetition Festival Show is accompanied by a free festival guide, which includes posters that delve into the history of movie advertising, designed by von Wedemeyer and Till Gathmann, as well as new texts written by Tessa Giblin, Saskia Vermeulen and Andrea Viliani. This is an extraordinary opportunity to see what amounts to a survey exhibition, expanded over time.
The publication and exhibition are made possible by the generous support of the Goethe-Institut Irland. With thanks to Philippe-Alain Michaud and Centre Pompidou for making possible the loan of From the Opposite Side. With further thanks to Andrea Viliani, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Koch Oberhuber Wolff, Till Gathmann, and Marisa Baptista. Project Arts Centre is supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council.
The Repetition Festival Show is a series of film and video installations by Clemens von Wedemeyer. It is a celebration of his artistic oeuvre, and offers a new approach to both the exhibition of installation video and the survey exhibition. The series brings four unique artworks to Dublin and then Trento in the period of a little-longer-than-usual exhibition run, and in the compact galleries of Project Arts Centre and Fondazione Galleria Civica.
Closing every third Saturday evening and opening with a new work on the following Monday (or Tuesday, in Trento), the exhibition format is inspired by von Wedemeyer’s looping film installations, which seem to refresh, enlarge and magnify the more you watch them. The subtle adjustments to screens and equipment and the shifting reinstallation of documentary elements all become part of the illusion of the show in a space that contains a strong sense of familiarity, yet in which everything has changed. Clemens von Wedemeyer will be prefiguring the installations and leaving traces of them as they pass, allowing the exhibition to suggest clues of coming changes while holding a memory of its previous incarnations right up until the final week.
Beginning with Occupation and The Making of Occupation, in which the central characters of film crew and extras gather in a field, the festival introduces von Wedemeyer’s deliberate unmasking of cinematic illusion, one of the most consistent formal elements of his practice. Otjesd and The Making of Otjesd is also a two-part installation, joining documentary footage with the artist’s research into border control, crowd behaviour and the processes in which migratory conditions become abstracted and trapped inside an endlessly repeating scene. Jumping forward chronologically to Clemens von Wedemeyer’’s most recent work, The Fourth Wall is a vast project in which three distinct pieces – Against Death, Interview and Found Footage map the territory surrounding the story of the Tasaday people from the Mindanao rainforest of the Philippines. The story is possessed by the manipulation of truth, and this in turn is reflected in the science fiction and faux documentary artworks in the installation. The final film in The Repetition Festival Show is the only artwork to consist of a single channel projection. Von Gegenüber (From the Opposite Side) is in many ways an accumulation of the attitudes and forms to be found in the previous works. This culmination takes place in real time, transforming the Central Station of Münster into a giant film set in which the documentary, fictional, staged, scripted, dramatised and composed tensions all collide throughout the journey of one day.
We are delighted to be able to provide all who visit The Repetition Festival Show with this free festival guide and new selection of texts to accompany the works. Designed by Till Gathmann and von Wedemeyer, the four newly commissioned film-posters reflect their research into the history of cinema advertising. It is a catalogue made as a guide, and freely available to all.
Enjoy the show,
Tessa Giblin
Curator of The Repetition Festival Show, and Project Arts Centre –Visual Arts.
Biography
Clemens von Wedemeyer was born in 1974 in Göttingen, and now lives and works in Berlin. He has worked in a variety of film media for the last decade, and shown work in both the museum or gallery and film festival contexts. In recent years von Wedemeyer has had solo exhibitions in Koch Oberhuber Wolff (Berlin 2010), Barbican Art Centre (London 2009), Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo (Santiago de Compostela 2008), Argos (Brussels 2007), Kölnischer Kunstverein (Köln 2006), CAC Brétigny-sur-Orge (Paris 2006), PS1 MOMA, (New York 2006) and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris 2003). Among the recent group shows he has participated in, are, Take me to your leader, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Bilder in Bewegung, Werke aus der Sammlung, Museum Ludwig, Köln, 1984, Austrian Cultural Forum NY, New York, Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism Platform, FRAC Chicago, Comrades of Time, Unicredit Pavillion, Bucharest all in 2010; Vilnius COOP: gaps, fictions and practices, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, There goes the neighborhood, MOCA USA, Cleveland, all in 2009; The Cinematic, or Moving Images Expanded: Insa Art Space, Seoul, TRANSLOCALMOTION, Seventh Shanghai Biennale, Revolutions – Forms That Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney, Fiction Vs. Reality, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisboa, Skulptur Projekte Münster, The California Files, re-viewing side effects of cultural memory, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, Umbau / Modification, Neue Kunst Halle St. Gallen, Le nuage Magellan, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Naked Life, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan (catalogue) all in 2008.
Filmography
2010
Light and Space (Sun Cinema Project), HDVideo, 45 min, 16:9
2009
The ‘Fourth Wall’ Project, consisting of:
Intro, 16 mm film loop, B/W, 3 min
The Gentle Ones: HD video, 28 min, 16:9
Reception: 3 channel video installation, 13 min, 3x 4:3
Found Footage: Digital video, 31 min, 4:3
Wood: 2 channel installation, HD video, 6:30 min, loop, 16:9
Against Death, 35 mm film transferred to HD video, 9 min., 16:9/ 1:1,85
2008
Die Probe (The Test), HD Video, 12 min, loop
The Inner Campus, 2 channel video installation, HD video, Blu-ray, stereo, loop, 12 min, 2008, aspect ratio 16:9
2007
Getrennter Monolog (Divided Monologue), Slideshow, 80 slides
Von Gegenüber (From the Opposite Side), 35 mm, realized for Projekte Münster
2006
Metropolis, Report from China, with Maya Schweizer, 42 min, video
Rien du Tout, with Maya Schweizer, 30 min, 35 mm and video
2005
Ohne Titel (Rekonstruktion), 16 mm transferred to video, 3 min, loop
Otjesd (Leaving) & The Making of Otjesd, 16mm transferred to video, 15 min, stereo, color, loop
2004
Die Siedlung, video, 20 mn; stereo, color
Das Bildermuseum brennt, 3 channel video installation, 27 min.
2003
Silberhöhe, 35mm / DVD, 10 mn, stereo; loop
2002
Big Business & The Making of Big Business, digital video / DVD, 25 min each, mono
Occupation & The Making of Occupation, 35 mm / DVD, 7 min, dolby surround / stereo
1998
Mass, DVD, 3 min, stereo
Awards and Grants
2008        Villa Romana, Firenze
2006        Karl – Schmidt – Rottluff – Stipendium
2006        Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen, German competition
2005        Residency at La Cité des arts, Paris
2005         GASAG Kunstpreis, Berlin
2005        Kunstpreis der Böttcherstrasse, Bremen
2004        Mention, Festival Les Ecrans Documentaires, Arcueil, France
2004        Grant by the Kulturstiftung Sachsen
2003        FIAV Award (Festival international de l‘art vidéo), Tavira
2002        VG Bildkunst Award for Experimental Film and Video–art, Munich Film Festival
2002        Marion Ermer Preis, Leipzig
2002        Grant by the DEFA Film Foundation, Berlin
1998        Focus (Festival für Fotografie und Elektrokunst), Dortmund