Outset Netherlands is proud to have supported Jennifer Tee and Melvin Moti for the 16th edition of the Istanbul Biennial. With the support of Outset the essential performance aspect of the work Tee was made possible at the biennial.
The 16th Istanbul Biennial entitled The Seventh Continent was curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. The title is a direct link to the formation of a huge mass of waste of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean that has been called ‘The Seventh Continent’. The 16th Istanbul Biennial explored this new continent: a world where humans and none-humans, our mass-productive systems and natural elements, drift together, reduced to particles of waste.
The works of Jennifer Tee (1973) respond to experiences of cultural hybridity, identity and language, and trade routes between people, commodities and objects from nature. Tee’s works in Istanbul took on the motif of tulips. The artist showed a series of collages made with pressed tulip petals, drawing from motifs of souls continuing on to new lives taken from tampan and palepai textiles from Sumatra. She has also carried out research in a museum garden in the Netherlands called Hortus Bulborum and has collaborated with Jane Lewty on an eco-poetry performance involving several dancers. Alongside these works, Tee has developed a knitted floor piece on which visitors could recline during invited moments.
Melvin Moti’s film Cosmism was partly inspired by the Russian Cosmists, a group of researchers exploring links between the cosmos and humankind. The video combines a filmed reenactment of Mary Stuart’s beheading with found footage of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in lower Manhattan. Dust, destruction and panic are interwoven with NASA footage of celestial orbits and the sun, aligning human brutality with cosmic concerns. With its focus on the role of the camera in documenting traumatic historical events, the film is a commentary on the representation of violence and twenty-four-hour spectatorship in our tumultuous age.
The main reason behind the support of Outset was the relevance of the subject, the location within its multicultural and political unstable city of this biennale and because we are convinced that art could host as acceleration for engagement and to generate a better understanding of and towards each other. The work of Tee resonates strongly within this context and therefore with Outset.
The Istanbul Biennial 2019 was held from September 14th until November 10th.
