The Tenant of Culture is the artistic practice of Dutch born artist Hendrickje Schimmel. For her first solo show at Soft Opening, the East London gallery, Tenant of Culture has created a body of work that dissects, dissembles, and rebuilds various garments of clothing to look at the politically charged world of textiles.
The Tenant of Culture’s working practice merges fashion and sculpture – instantly recognisable fashion logos and designs are ripped, cut, shredded, sliced and sewn back together. It goes beyond up-cycling, it’s repurposing cultural movements and turning them into futuristic totems that point to a dystopian age. By her own deciding, she is not a designer; even her name is a nod to this. Where a fashion house refers to itself as a Maison, she self-mythologises as simply a tenant.
By using post-consumer waste in her work, she looks at the impossibility of a brand being fully ethical. Yes, they can be environmentally aware, but “There’s such a highly developed division of labour within the fashion industry, through subcontracting and globally scattered assembly lines, it’s really hard to track where and under what conditions something is made,” she told ArtReview.
Designs are ripped, cut, sliced and sewn back together. It goes beyond up-cycling, it is repurposing cultural movements and turning them into futuristic totems that point to a dystopian age.
With her show at Soft Opening, she looks at the dissonance between the creation of waste and the aestheticisation of damage. By using traditional craft techniques that utilise the extraction of the fibres used in the waste garments, together with her own deconstructive methods, she references the process of ‘faux’ ageing and artificially ripped jeans. Although these derelicté fashions might seem thoroughly modern, they do have a political past. In the mid 18th century, slashing was used as an act of protest and the silk weavers in Spitalfields waged campaigns of destroying each other’s work in an attempt to stabilise wages. These days, however, we have see luxury fashion houses only recently end the practice of tossing unsold items on the pyre, or slicing them up, to prevent deflation from market flooding.
Tenant of Culture’s work renders these garments useless in the form that they were intended to take. Instead, through her knife, they take on a new meaning: where trends become meaningless the minute they are grasped and realised, her work turns those moments into a solid question marks over the future of fashion.
Tenant of Culture – 8 September–21 October, 2023 6 Minerva Street, E2 9EH