Jennifer Tee
Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings
Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Dutch artist Jennifer Tee insists on the essential bond between spirit and matter in defiance of the materialist understanding of world history. For her solo presentation “Ancestral Beginnings, Sessile Beings” she investigated the history of migration through the transnational circulation of commodities that connect the metropole and the colony, as well as the production and exchange of artifacts, various belief systems, and temporalities that traverse and undo hierarchies. 

The first work viewers encountered at Tina Kim Gallery was the sprawling Crystalline Floorpieces / Sanguine Sea (2019). An expansive territory knitted from hand-dyed wool and dotted with small ceramic oblong shapes, Sanguine Sea continues Tee’s interest in alternative strategies of relaxation and comfort, evident in her invitation of poets and dancers to interact with it in a form of participatory engagement. Representing an archipelago or a constellation, this particular work, which was situated on the floor, evades geographic or temporal specificity, liberally inheriting modernist abstraction’s placeless and utopian impulses. Similarly, Crystalline Floorpieces / Terra Umber (2024), is a shadowy site of refuge, patiently awaiting confirmation and interaction. Within these two works, a tone was set: Things are in constant flux and can only be comprehended through the relations they perform.