Running Against Time
Video installation SMK, Copenhagen 2023
Artist Jessie Kleemann, Videographer Christian Brems
The performance, Lone Wolf Runner, is centred on a gigantic futuristic sled installation and a soundscape. The central action in Kleemann’s performance is the act of running. Running as a performance, struggle and exhaustion, or more philosophically, as a meditative practice associated with freedom, cleansing, and oblivion.
A four Screen Art Work.
Courtesy: SMK and the artist. Photocredit: Christian Brems.
Video still - Running Against Time
Arkhticós Dolorôs 2019
Arkhticós Dolorôs 2019
Recorded at the Ice sheet by Sermeq Kujalleq, Ilulissat isfjord, Greenland.
The ice is melting. And it is melting in Jessie Kleemann’s video performance Arkhticós Dolorôs (Arctic Pain), which was shot in Ilulissat in Greenland. As water trickles out from under the artist’s bare feet, creating puddles and channels in the ice, she performs an insistent action with a large, black piece of nylon fabric, raising it above her head in the strong wind. The tenacious struggle with the wind grows increasingly challenging, and gradually the wildness of nature itself reverberates in her body.
The forces of nature are accentuated by the hand-held video footage, letting us feel the rustling of the wind through the camera’s jerky movements and the whistling on the soundtrack. The angle of the camera hides neither the film crew nor the helicopter used to get the team onto the ice. These traits highlight the fact that the video is a documentation of the performance, one where the film crew was the audience, just as those of us who look at the work now are her audience.
In her 2021 poetry collection Arkhticós Dolorôs, Kleemann also works with the ‘Arctic pain’.
Originally written in Danish, the collection includes the following lines:
the suffering of mother arctic is the ice age of the new melting now comes a time of war for the new descendants.
Text: SMK
Photocredit: Jessie Kleemann
Write to Jessie Kleemann for further - concerning the video work Arkhticós Dolorôs.
Kinaasunga
Jessie Kleemann
Video 1988, 12 min
Videomik eqqumiitsuliaq
Concept, performance and poetry: the artist
Camera: Ebbe Qvist Sound: Kim Larsen, Sermit Records
Edit: Knud Aqqa Lynge, Nanoq TVCourtesy: SMK and Jessie Kleemann. Video Still.
Photocredit: Jessie Kleemann / VISDA
Kinaasunga is Jessie Kleemann’s first video performance. The video shows her wearing very distinctive, graphic make-up – her eyes are outlined with black eyeliner, while a rectangular shape has been paintedaround her mouth in lipstick. On the one hand, the dark make-up is reminiscent of a piece of tape forcing her lips together, silencing her. On the other hand, the face paint speaks into the punk culture of the 1980s, where expressive make-up was used as a visual manifestation of resistance to norms and authorities.
The footage shows how Kleemann’s scope for movement is restricted to a claustrophobic space between the camera lens and the white sheets on the wall and the bed, which serve as a background. By contrast, the accompanying audio track unfolds a tale of fleeting, unfettered movement, of the wandering mind’s flitting between dream and reality. Here we hear Kleemann read the poem Kinaasunga In a voice that grows gradually distorted, accompanied by the notes of a bass guitar. Due to the linguistic feature of the Greenlandic language known as kalaallisut – where subject and verb are fused – Kinaasunga can be translated both as ‘Who I am’ and ‘Who am I?’ This interplay between the assertive, self-aware self and the questioning self is characteristic of Kleemann’s art practice, which rarely allows itself to be reduced to a single narrative.
Text: SMK