Soft Opening, London

11 April–16 May, 2024
Condo Mexico City
hosted by PEANA
Tlaxcala 103, Roma Sur

Soft Opening is pleased to be hosted by PEANA for the upcoming edition of Condo Mexico City, with a solo exhibition from Tenant of Culture.

By disassembling and rebuilding manufactured garments, Tenant of Culture examines where ideological, political or cultural perspectives materialize in the production and marketing of apparel. The artist seeks materials sourced from various stages of the garment cycle that relate to recent trends in fashion and their socio-political histories. The mutated former wearables exist between sculpture and product, strangely familiar to everyday articles of dress. The presentation examines the strategic codification of visual languages and techniques in luxury commodity production that obscure or expose dynamics of power, domination and assertion of class via a constant re-/de- valuation of goods.

Tenant of Culture is the artistic practice of Hendrickje Schimmel (b. 1990, Arnhem), who lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Ladder at Soft Opening, London (2023); IN SITU at Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2023); Good Signal at Duarte Sequeira, Braga (2023) and Soft Acid at Camden Art Centre, London (2022). Recent group exhibitions include Insides Out at Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen (2023); British Textile Biennial, Blackburn (2023); Beautiful Repair at Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2023); 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 Most Beautiful Swiss Books Award.

PDF

Exhibition pamphlet