Jessie Kleemann ^(GL)

Jessie Kleemann (b.1959). 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, feminism, the body and performance art. Jessie Kleemann has spent most of her life traveling back and forth between Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), where she was born, and Denmark, where she lives and works today. Based on complex relationships and exchanges between cultures, her practice examines how the Greenlandic identity and tradition, the country and its language all change over time.

In her works, Kleemann challenges and plays with symbols and objects from colonized Greenland and the Inuit culture: from ship’s biscuits and pearl collars to mask dance, myths and lard. Using equal parts humor and tragedy as tools, she dramatizes critical topics such as colonialisation, climate and other cross-cultural and transnational challenges in the present.