Tenant of Culture

In Ladder, Tenant of Culture presents a new body of work that examines the perceived dichotomy between destruction and decoration, interrogating how the aesthetic of waste has, for centuries, been appropriated within the fashion industry. These new wall-based and suspended works highlight the dissonance between the creation of physical waste and the aestheticization of damage.

In the exhibition, the artist expands her approach to undoing material, utilising traditional craft techniques based on the extraction or destruction of threads and fibres. These processes include devoré, open work embroidery and slicing as well as deconstructive methods developed through material experimentation to reference the practice in the garment industry of intentionally creating rips or slashes in previously undamaged clothing and accessories. The artificially ripped pair of jeans may be the most well-known contemporary example, but for centuries textile workers slashed garments as both a political act of resistance and a mechanism of control.

The cultural significance of the destruction of clothing is grounded in several notable moments in fashion’s industrial and stylistic history. The “cutters” movement of the mid 18th century utilised slashing as an act of protest, while the Spitalfields silk weavers engaged in campaigns of destroying each other’s work in a battle to stabilise wages. During the European Renaissance, the decorative technique of cutting slits in the outer layer of a garment to expose the fabric underneath was inspired by the distressed clothing of soldiers returning from battle, serving to visually distinguish political allegiances and social hierarchies. Today, the common approach of luxury brands is to slice unsold luxury goods to prevent value deflation; an economic strategy to create exclusivity through scarcity. Tenant of Culture explores this inheritance, disassembling and rebuilding manufactured garments to look at the politically charged treatment of textiles, examining the ways in which ideological frameworks with wide social implications materialise in methods of production, circulation and marketing of apparel.

The works in Ladder examine the complex relation between fashion trends and their manufacturing processes. They aim to confront the cognitive dissonance between our individual relationship with clothes versus the global system in which they are produced by offering multiple perspectives – between individual desire and industry, transparency and concealment, the brand new and the discarded.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text from Eilidh Duffy, available as part of a free, limited edition oversize pamphlet.

Tenant of Culture is the artistic practice of Hendrickje Schimmel (b. 1990, Arnhem), who lives and works in London. The artist’s most recent solo exhibition In Situ was held at Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2023). Prior to this, the artist’s first UK institutional solo exhibition, Soft Acid opened last year at Camden Art Centre, London (2022). Soft Acid will be exhibited this year as part of the British Textile Biennial 2023. Recent exhibitions include Insides Out at Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen (2023); Beautiful Repair at Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2023); Good Signal at Duarte Sequeira, Braga (2023); Piece(d) Work at Ivory Tars, Glasgow (2022); Post-digital Intimacy at the National Gallery Prague, Prague (2022); Eternally Yours at Somerset House, London (2022) and Testament at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2022). The work of Tenant of Culture is in the collections of the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney. In 2020 Soft Opening published the artist’s first monograph in collaboration with Charles Asprey which was one of the winners of the Swiss Most Beautiful Books Award.