Jen DeNike: Sculpting Time

About

signs and symbols is pleased to present Sculpting Time, a video exhibition by Jen DeNike as part of the gallery’s series of online-only solo presentations of video works. The artist's most recent video work, Sculpting Time, follows a hypnotic cinematic montage of nude women walking public staircases. Shot on location in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Berlin, the video is the first body of work DeNike has exclusively researched, filmed and produced in Germany. DeNike creates a liminal space, where women descend, ascend, cross, moving up and down, over and over. DeNike evokes performance interventions in both architecture and nature that renegotiate the nude female body as a place of power.

DeNike writes: 

“Sometimes you have to go backwards to move forwards. My great grandmother emigrated to Germany as a Finnish-Russian Jew in the 1920’s where she met her German husband; their daughter, my grandmother, was born in Deutschland. In 1933, they took a ship to New York City. Many years later in 2007, while researching their path with my father, I discovered the New York address they hand wrote on the ship manifest was on Hudson Avenue in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn (only half a block from my first apartment in Dumbo circa 1995-2002). In 2017, I realized that Mitra, founder of signs and symbols, also lives half a block from my old place, and half a block from my grandparents original address, so it goes. Take a breath, there is more… Sculpting Time started in 2016 — while I was lecturing at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, I was struck by the staircases throughout the building and its patriarchy of held history, of artists and professors. One night during that trip I convinced a friend to come over and walk nude up and down the main staircase of Kunstakademie, but I never did anything with the footage, it was a sketch, percolating. Four years later, it was time, in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Frankfurt — over a year this filming unfolded. After having a very strong case of cv19 in March of 2020, when I could do nothing else except lie down, I decided to walk. I went to Germany and I walked, and found women who would walk. I walked for my great-grandmother, for my grandmother, and I walked an inner geography in a country where I have built my own history through my art since 2006. An expansion of time, by going inwards, I went outwards. The first nude is me walking the Rhine River in Dusseldorf opposite Kunstakademie, and so it goes…”

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

*Please note that DeNike's video will be viewable online from Thursday, January 13 at 6:00pm until Friday, February 25 at 6:00pm. Following the end of the exhibition, the video will only be accessible via private link and password. We trust that given our current circumstances, everyone will act in good faith and good will, understanding that these are primary artworks by our artists that are collected and which would otherwise be password protected.   
 

jen denike (b. 1971) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her video, photography, performance, collage and installation work has been exhibited internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; MoMA PS1; The Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Participant Inc; 54th Venice Biennale; Garage Projects, Moscow; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; MOCA Toronto; MACRO ROMA; Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart; Red Line Contemporary Art Center, Denver; CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-On-Hudson; MEF Museo Ettore Fico, Torino; Schauspiel Köln Opera House; Art Basel Miami Film Sector; and Wallis Annenberg Center For the Performing Arts, Los Angeles. Select commissioned projects include Bombay Beach Biennale, EMPAC, LAND Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Creative Time, Performa Biennial and Faena Art. Her work is held in the permanent public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Julia Stoschek Collection, IL Giardino dei Lauri Collection and The Bunker in West Palm Beach, among other private collections.