COPENHAGEN.- National Gallery of Denmark presents Jessie Kleemann’s first-ever solo show at a Danish museum. The exhibition, which includes several completely new works, sees Kleemann explore how Greenlandic identity, culture and nature change over time.

An elegant dog sledge with frames of precious wood, a sparkling undercarriage and powerful ATV tires: Jessie Kleemann’s (b. 1959 in Upernavik, Greenland) 2023 version of a dog sledge is created for a changed landscape where the ice is melting and the preconditions of traditional trapper life are changing. As a subtle monument to humanity’s constant drive towards industrialisation and growth, the sledge is adapted to a new source of sustenance – tourism – becoming a kind of stretch limousine or oversized tourist bus.

For three decades, Kleemann has been a significant figure on the contemporary art scene with her original and expressive approach to video art, experimental theatre and performance art. In August, SMK launches the exhibition Jessie Kleemann: Running Time, which is her first-ever solo show at a Danish art museum. The exhibition focuses on Kleemann’s performative and installation-based practice, spanning the full range from her very first video performance, Kinaasunga from 1988, to the present day with a number of new works created especially for this exhibition, including a brand-new performance, Lone Wolf Runner, which will be performed live four times during exhibition run.

Colonisation, climate and international politics

Kleemann’s art takes its point of departure in the complex interrelationships between Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), where she was born and raised, and Denmark, where she lives and works today. Mixing the humorous and the tragic in equal measure, she dramatises topics such as colonisation, climate and international power politics by exploring cultural objects and symbols from traditional Inuit culture, colonial Greenland and contemporary intercultural Greenland. Here we find the dog sledge and the kamik. Beads and amulets. Mask dances, myths and lard. But also colonial goods such as ship biscuits, flour, rice, alcohol and coffee as well as items from contemporary Western culture such as designer dresses and stilettos.

‘Today I live in Denmark, and because of this I see the changes in Greenland very clearly, from the inside and from the outside. When I’m there, I see not only the melting of the ice but also a changed landscape and a culture where everything moves and shifts with great rapidity. This can be observed by how many people are moving all the time, and by the fact that a new development towards an uncertain future feels very close now,’ says Jessie Kleemann.

Kleemann does not indulge in romantic yearnings for the past or an original culture. Quite the contrary. She uses her cultural heritage as a living, mutable material that can be processed and given new meanings. In doing so, she challenges the exoticising dream of an unspoilt Greenland and the more stereotypical notions so often embedded in discussions about colonised peoples.

The universal, existential question ‘Who am I?’ is a pervasive undercurrent in her work. Over the years, that question has been unpacked with ever-greater nuance, and in Kleemann’s latest works the issue is addressed partly playfully, partly with anger and pain as she point towards utopian and dystopian future scenarios

Jessie Kleemann

Jessie Kleemann (b. 1959 in Upernavik, Greenland) lives and works in Copenhagen. Kleemann originally trained as a graphic designer. In 1978-79 she was a student at the Tuukkaq Theatre in Fjaltring, after which she began working with video and performance. In the years 1984-91, Kleemann was head of the Greenland School of Art in Nuuk.

Recent exhibitions and performances include Nuuk Art Museum and Nordatlantens Brygge, Copenhagen (Atlantikumi, 2023); Armory Center for the Arts, California (Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology, 2023); Nordatlantens Brygge, Copenhagen (Perler på snor – en arktisk historiefortælling, 2018); Anchorage Museum, Alaska (Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations, 2016); KNIPSU Gallery, Bergen (The Pleasure of Negative Emotions, 2014); Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt (The Weather Diaries, NFB, 2014).

In 1997, she published her first collection of poems, Taallat. Digte. Poems. In 2021 she published the poetry collection Arkhticós Dolorôs.

National Gallery of Denmark
Jessie Kleemann: Running Time
August 24th, 2023 - November 26th, 2023