Christopher Dettmeier: Happy Birthday

Christoph Dettmeier can find a Wild West prairie in Detroit, Berlin or anywhere that an industrial wasteland can stand in for a ghost town. In his best-known photographic works they form the background for silhouettes of lone riders and grotesque cowboys and are depicted in such a way that these essentially non-descript places become surreal, absolutely
timeless, and astonishingly picturesque.

This multi-media exhibition - his first solo show in the UK - features a selection of such epic landscapes produced in response to significant locations in Wales and reflecting on this year’s centenary commemorations of the start of World War I. Dettmeier takes as his starting point the collective trauma of the war and the subsequent development of horror film and contemporary gaming genres and inserts this into these epic landscapes — most significantly in the practice trenches of Penally which provide a poignant backdrop to a new photographic series and a film that follows the imagined sight lines of a WW1 computer game to traverse the trenches in
a frenetic and relentless manner.