Jessie Kleemann is in great demand. Suddenly, after several decades of only moderate attention from art institutions, the 63-year-old Greenlandic artist can have her pick among many suitors. In 2021, she published the poetry collection Arkhticós Dolorôs with the renowned publisher Arena. In the spring of this year she received the three-year stipend from the Danish Arts Foundation, and now, just a few month later, she has opened Running Time, her first major retrospective at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK). Even the SMK had to share her nicely with others: Rønnebæksholm opened its own Kleemann exhibition just one week prior. The ardent wooers have made peace with each other and coordinated their exhibition efforts so that SMK presents the performance and sculpture-oriented part of Kleemann’s oeuvre while Rønnebæksholm focuses on works on paper.
The fact that all this attention has reached a peak right now reflects how the zeitgeist has finally caught up with Kleemann. Decolonialisation is firmly on the agenda, and after several years of delving into Denmark’s various misdeeds in the West Indies, there is now no way around listening to what Kleemann – and other Greenlandic artists – have to say about the outpouring of Danish violence pointed due north. Themes such as belonging, colonial exchanges, cultural disruption, trauma, class, power, and gender are embedded in all of Kleemann’s works. At the same time, they evade didactic interpretation because Kleemann’s art is always in a state of transformation.
Retrospective in scope, Running Time presents a tightly curated selection of the artist’s early production as well as several works created especially for the occasion. There is something cyclical about Kleemann’s works, a trait also found in the Danish title, which translates roughly as “time is running is time running.” Almost mantra-like, it points to the artist’s enduring interest in language, action, and existence. If time is running, Kleemann is quite literally running in Running Against Time (2023), a performance for cameras presented across four vertical screens placed a few metres apart in Sculpture Street – the glass-covered area connecting the original museum building and the new wing. Despite the physical distance between them, the screens are still closely connected by the work’s visuals: a snow-covered Greenlandic landscape with a frozen lake and mountains in the background. Here, the artist runs with heavy steps, not entirely without humour, loping from one screen to the other. She races with time under a cerulean sky that fades into mists and grows darker, blackening towards night. She races against time, crossing the screens until the sun is once more high in the sky; and who can say in which direction time goes?
The SMK’s Sculpture Street is a notoriously wretched space, neither suitable for hanging out nor for exhibiting artworks. Anything could be drowned out here, and most things are. Kleemann’s work struggles here too, yet is far from powerless against its surroundings because of its sense of movement. It is on its way, perhaps rather like a Qivittoq, one of the mountain walkers of legend. Still, it is a relief that the curator, Birgitte Anderberg, has also drafted in a couple of smaller, nearby rooms for the exhibition, allowing visitors to examine and respond to Kleemann’s works in a more conducive setting.
The video-performance Arkhticós Dolorôs (2019) plays in a room as chilly as the soundtrack is relentless, and as frosty as Kleemann’s feet. The artist appears once again in a Greenlandic landscape, dressed in black on a sunny, icy-white, and very windy day. She carries a huge piece of black cloth with her, which she proceeds to spread out on the snow. The fabric becomes something of a battlefield when Kleemann steps onto it barefoot, entangles herself in it and unfurls it like a sail behind her, fighting against the wind like a steadfast Madonna of sorrow. Kleemann ends up on her hands and feet, as if in surrender, rubbing her hair and face against the ice. Pregnant with arctic pain, she rises up, carrying the black fabric in front of her belly. She wraps the fabric in transparent plastic and holds the bundle over her head like a crackling halo of pain. In her similarly titled collection of poems, Kleemann writes: “arms are crossed on the wall / and no Christ in sight / the thread dangles and / is pulled through / the virgin’s wall / that drives the white / in the archive of the mind.” Arctic pain may be many things, but it is also very much a pain of colonisation. The white metaphorises the Danish colonisation and monetisation of Greenland; the white is the snow that bleeds blue with the horrors of global warming; the white is the eyes that roll in the head.
In another room, Kleemann’s first video-performance Kinaasunga (1988) is presented alongside a range of documentation of live performances carried out over the years. These all help to convey a clear sense of her enduring artistic power, which continues to be in evidence in the recently premiered performance Lone Wolf Runner. I was deeply moved when Kleemann, in an almost childlike, yet also transgressive and yearning gesture began, with the gentlest touch possible, to comb the hair of two slightly rattled yet trusting women from the audience in Sculpture Street. Kleemann cites the performance artist Marina Abramović as a crucial influence and role model, but in many of her works I see more of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), whose carnal, aggressive, and humorous sensibility is infused here with a distinctive gentleness and the political complexities of the Arctic as main ingredients. Kleemann’s works are also playful like Yoko Ono’s early Fluxus works in their explorations of what language does, what actions mean, and what they might come to mean if we move with them and let ourselves be moved. Kleemann moves, but is Kleemann moving?
The exhibition at Rønnebæksholm bears the Old West Norse title Lá. Læ. Likkja. Magna, which means something like “lay, poison, corpse, and sorcery.” The title represents Kleemann’s interest in the body, nature, geopolitics, and mythology. Revolving around printmaking and the painterly aspects of Kleemann’s endeavours, the exhibition mostly features works on paper.
Upon entering Rønnebæksholm, I was greeted by the exhibition title, hand-painted onto the wall. It was immediately apparent that something is fundamentally wrong with the scene in purely painterly terms. What was supposed to be a physical, dramatic manifestation that connects language and painting seems thin and flat to me. The brush has not been generous enough: the text appears too delicate, wavering and uncertain, its placing inharmonious. Of course, we could easily wave this aside; after all, this is not an actual work of art, just a bit of text. But for me, it is quite literally the writing on the wall, pointing out problems relating to Kleemann’s pictorial practice.
Comprising some fifteen works and series of works as well as a single video piece, Lá. Læ. Likkja. Magna extends throughout seven mansion-like galleries. Formats and mediums vary, ranging from smaller prints on paper to large canvases primed in black. One room contains the work Lá. Læ. Likkja. Magna – the Small Organisms Huffing and Puffing at Sassuma (2023), a scroll of paper with semi-abstract underwater imagery in bright colours mounted on a spiral screen. Visitors may step inside the work and feel embraced by it, but, for me, it is anything but an all-encompassing, immersive painterly experience. The concept of physicality – of a direct connection to the human body – is often mentioned in discussions on Kleemann’s art. But although these pictures, which alternate between abstraction, seascapes, and landscapes, are distinctly performative, bearing traces of the artist’s own painting body in the form of hand and foot prints, to my mind they lack true physicality on the purely painterly level. In several works, the white sheets of paper shriek out loudly in their encounter with the glistening ink. Semi-abstract motifs rely on the fact that ink forming beautiful blots as it dries can be a message in itself, or that a dry brush with too little paint will by definition give rise to a certain rawness of composition and sense of impulsivity. How does the paint settle on the ground? Does the painting medium support or drown out the actual figuration? Does the form help to convey the message of the work? All these questions feel unconsidered.
The best gallery contains four large free-hanging works called Anori (Storm) Where Am I? (2022–23). These are canvases, primed in black, on which Kleemann has applied splashes and blots of white paint, evoking dramatic, landscape-like scenes. Something exciting happens in the clash between the flat matte background and the almost frothy paint. Additionally, a recording of Kleemann reading aloud from Arkhticós Dolorôs plays in the room. Together, these elements create a striking and curious space that made me want to stay for a long time.
Overall, however, Kleemann’s narratives on mythology and existence are stymied by the formal and technical weakness of the works. Action is not always enough, even in performative conceptual painting. Once the action is over, we still need to step back and see what actually came of it. Especially if there are specific points and issues being explored and addressed. Form and content, as we all know, go hand in hand. All in all, the exhibition at Rønnebæksholm would have benefited from mixing a bit of the magic from SMK into the paint.
