Jennifer Tee:
Let it Come Down – at Bonner Kunstverein
Jennifer Tee’s sculpture, installation, performance and collage take inspiration from esoteric thought and practices. Her sculpture often incorporates labour-intensive, traditional handicrafts such as knitting or pottery and these objects are often then used within performances.
This exhibition takes its title from an ominous line spoken by an assassin in William Shakespeare’s 17th century play Macbeth. Tee has adopted Shakespeare’s metaphor as a central motif for a new body of work inspired by recent political upheaval and corresponding acts of resistance.
Let it Come Down is also the title for a large-scale collage made from dried tulip petals that Tee harvested in the Netherlands. The work is part of a series that draw upon Sumatran ‘Palepai’ (Ship Cloths); traditional Indonesian textiles that typically depict a journey on water. The works also reference Tee’s own ancestral heritage which includes Dutch Tulip farmers as well as Chinese-Indonesian émigrées. This is accompanied by 25 new, ceramic ‘resist shapes’; wall-mounted, semispherical sculptures that appear to be dented by force or exposed to heavy rain. An array of hand-knitted objects pieces installed on the floor provide a platform for new performances developed in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Miri Lee, dancers, David Kam and Céline HyunJin Barreau and poet Jane Lewty. The exhibition is also punctuated by a series of readings delivered by the staff of the Kunstverein from the selection of polemic literature in Tee’s Resist Stack of Books.
Jennifer Tee
Let it Come Down
2 December 2017 – 21 January 2018
Hochstadenring 22
Bonn (DE)
Courtesy of the artist and Bonner Kunstverein
Photography: Mareike Tocha