Working with memory and with cinematic attempts to preserve something of what has disappeared is one of Prof. Dr. Jelena Jeremejewa’s central themes. Since April 1, she has been an assistant professor of film in the context of the arts at the Institute for Media, Theater, and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim.

“When you engage with the past, you inevitably bring something new into being—something that would not have existed without this engagement,” says Jeremejewa. She came to Germany from Ukraine at the age of twelve. Her experience of migration and a lack of a voice shapes her perspective on how images relate to certainties when language reaches its limits. “I’m interested in how images attempt to depict reality - and how and why they fail in the process. But also, how they can hint at experiences for which there is no language yet.”

Her work begins at this intersection of documentary, animation, memory, and artistic research. “My work moves between documentary observation and artistic construction. It also deals with the transfer of experience and trauma across generations and the question of how such processes can be captured on film—or even understood at all.”

Deconstructing Images, Creating Images

In her current project, Jeremejewa works with paper-cut animation. She cuts images from old cookbooks, technical sketches, and other visual artifacts into pieces, extracts individual fragments from their original context, and reassembles them. In the animation, these fragments come to life; interviews and voices interact with them. In this way, the destruction and reorganization of existing images give rise to new visual spaces - for experiences and events that cannot be directly represented.

Especially in a present where reality is increasingly conveyed through images—and where these images are simultaneously becoming ever easier to manipulate through digital processes and artificial intelligence - the question of their value arises anew. “In the past, the documentary image was considered proof. Today, we no longer ask only whether an image is real, but why we consider it credible,” says Jeremejewa. “It’s paradoxical: in an image-dominated present, that which has no image threatens to disappear from our perception—and thus also from our memory. At the same time, we’re drowning in a flood of images. For my work, images are less evidence than opportunities to engage with the past.” 

From Film to Artistic Research

Jeremejewa’s path into research led through filmmaking. She studied documentary directing at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg and directed films such as *Der Ernst des Lebens*, *Irgendwo dazwischen*, and *Orlando—Eine kurze Geschichte der Mittelklasse*. In 2021, she earned her Ph.D. from the Bauhaus University Weimar with a dissertation on trauma as a personal and collective experience in post-Soviet documentary film. In her artistic work, she combines documentary forms with installation-based methods, as in *Frohes Neues Jahr*, an installation comprising 43 years of political New Year’s addresses. 

Jeremejewa herself views artistic practice as a form of research. For her, thinking arises not only through theoretical reflection but also through editing, animating, organizing, discarding, and reassembling. Personal and political history intertwine in this process: migration, war, memory, class, and education do not appear as abstract themes, but rather within concrete biographies.

In her teaching as well, Jeremejewa emphasizes this connection between observation, practice, and reflection. In Hildesheim, she is planning, among other things, a seminar that builds on Harun Farocki’s project *Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit* (*An Attitude Toward Work*). Students are encouraged to observe work processes in their own environments through film and to reflect on how work is made visible, narrated, and interpreted through images.

Jeremejewa is also active in extracurricular educational work. In workshops, she introduces children and young people from migrant backgrounds to artistic forms of expression and creates spaces where their experiences, stories, and perspectives can be expressed.