A central theme in Jessie Kleemann’s artistic practice is global climate change, which manifests with striking clarity in the Arctic and in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat). Arctic pain forms a recurring undertone in her work, and she often uses her own body as a tool to awaken our memory of and connection to the landscape, to myth, to the future, and to Greenland—thereby opening a bodily language that we can sense and reflect upon.
As part of Bringing In The Tide, Kleemann contributes a performance presented three times at Blåvand Beach during the exhibition period. The performance is based on a Greenlandic legend and reflects Greenlandic ways of life and relationships with nature, the spiritual, and the supernatural. The work seeks to expand perspectives on nature from the local to the global by bringing the landscape of the Wadden Sea into dialogue with Greenlandic cosmologies. Here, a different worldview is at play—an animistic and spiritual perspective in which nature is more than an ecosystem or a resource, but a living, ensouled realm with which humans are in relationship. Kleemann’s performance activates legend and myth as forms of knowledge, suggesting that storytelling, spirituality, and cultural and embodied experience are also ways of knowing and understanding nature.
BIO
Jessie Kleemann (b. 1959, Greenland) is a Greenlandic performance artist, painter, installation artist, and poet. She trained as an actor at Tuukkaq Theatre in Denmark and as a visual artist at the Graphic Workshop in Nuuk. Her practice includes video works, sculptures, installations, and live performances. From 1984 to 1991, she was director of the Art School in Nuuk. Her most recent book, Arkhticós Dolorôs (2021), was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2022 as well as the Danish Poetry Prize. In 2023, she presented two major exhibitions: Time Runs Runs Time at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) and Lá: Læ: Likkja.Magna at Rønnebæksholm Art Hall.