Jeneen Frei Njootli: small mounds of flesh form
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Platform: Centre for Photographic & Digital Arts 121-100 Arthur St, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3
Jeneen Frei Njootli, "small mounds of flesh form," 2020
video still
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday 04 September at 7-9 PM
ARTIST ENGAGEMENT: Friday 04 September at 7 PM
IN CONVERSATION: Thursday 24 September at 7 PM
Jeneen Frei Njootli’s exhibition small mounds of flesh form is a new video and installation work that sees the artist perform for the land. This work considers the artist’s relationship with the land, reciprocity/relationality, contagions, colonial-induced climate change and collectives.
We paid for the berries with our blood. Torches have to be lit on certain hunts. They witnessed the graves being dug. They seen the kiss on the mountain. The nets being checked. The fish getting smoked. They keep the caribou moving. For some it is an image of death or at least discomfort. What does it mean to welcome this? To acknowledge it as part of a reciprocal relationship with the land? There’s romanticizing land-based pedagogy and then there's getting chewed right up in clothes you've been wearing for three days and not minding it. Tiny mounds form on my skin as I walk through the tussocks. – Jeneen Frei Njootli
BIOGRAPHY
Jeneen Frei Njootli is a 2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin artist working in performance, sound, textiles, images, collaboration, workshops and feral scholarship. They are now living in the ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples and teaching at UBC. If you are interested in learning more about Jeneen's work, please check out my auntie bought all her skidoos with beadmoney, available through the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) bookstore.