12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Jeneen Frei Njootli lives and works in Old Crow, Yukon, CA

Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist and cocreator of the ReMatriate Collective, an Indigenous women’s art collective that works to alter the representation of Indigenous communities to the public at large. Frei Njootli’s performance-based practice incorporates sound, literal and figurative residues, textiles, and cross-species collaborations into sculptures and installations that preserve and expand the traditional meaning of social practices and community production.

Working as well outside of galleries and other institutional spaces, Frei Njootli broadens participation and suggests different models of agency, while remaining anchored to place. The artist interrogates materials and objects associated with the memory of their ancestors. Images of Indigeneity and corresponding systems of commodification, romanticization, and fetishtization by Western colonial culture are of primary concern.

For the 12th Berlin Biennale, Frei Njootli presents an installation or environment that subverts the reigning nature/ culture dichotomy to interrogate regimes of private property. Thunderstruck (2013/22) assembles several sculptural elements to create a mythical space: figures interact with altered traditional objects. This space serves as an effectual matrix to consider legacies of displacement, substandard and illegal housing for displaced communities, and the literal toxicity of colonial legacies.

Noam Segal

Exhibitions

Good to know, 2021, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal (CA)

Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes, 2021, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage (US)

Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade, 2020/21, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (DE)

Jeneen Frei Njootli, 2019, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (CA) (solo)

Attachment, 2019, Macaulay & Co. Fine Art, Vancouver (CA) (solo)

NDN BURN, 2018, FIERMAN, New York City (US) (solo)