Wendimagegn Belete 28.4 – 3.6.

Title: Frozen Memories.

Wendimagegn Belete(born 1986, Ethiopia) received MFA in Contemporary Art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative writing, Norway, in 2017 and a BFA in Painting from ASFAD , Addis Abeba University, Ethiopia in 2012. His practice mainly focuses on painting and videos. He is also interested in appropriation and re-interpretation of video archives and material residues of the past whether photos, book, maps, drawings, texts, signs that signify something from the past. His work has been exhibited in Ethiopia and internationally.

«Frozen Memories»is an experimental video collage that extends from a video installation «Unveil»

My interest is primarily in archival video footage that has been stored in digital archives over the years and in some cases begun to be forgotten or people shy away from using. Often, this clip has historical values and also the images convey they’re a passageway to a past life and those people aren’t that different than us and the problems they faced are the same as our problems that still confront our society. I’m really interested in how the materiality of the video can be edited and braided into different stories and altered into other narrations. In other words, it is a trial to find a different way of looking at the footage through its materiality, Moreover, the viewer is engaged with it in time in temple space and so there’s a dialogue between the maker and the viewer with set parameters. This works deals with layers of reality that depicts archaeological layers of time and looking for moments of exquisite decay happening to the film on a chemical level / digitalize and in perspective of history. On the other hand, using images that have been recorded decades ago reflects all the different things that have happened to the film since then, and how they relate to each other. When people were filmed they had no idea about the context of the film. The footage has taken on its own life. It’s also a conversation with digital media because nobody knows how long digital footage would have survived. The old analog film footage has persevered into a new form, and the spirit is still intact.

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