BOOKS: The One and the Many, Textiles and Tulip Petals

Join us for a special BOOKS program that marks the exhibition closing of Still Shifting, Mother Field, a solo exhibition by Jennifer Tee and presented together with the Vienna Secession. Together with special guests, this program delves into the exhibition and its richly illustrated catalogue, both of which focus upon Tee’s Tampan Tulip series of large-scale collages that combine Sumatran woven textile designs with hand-picked and dried tulip petals.

The evening will take place as a round-table, focusing diverse perspectives upon Tee’s Tampan Tulip series as they appear both in the exhibition and transposed to the publication. The program is sited between locations and time-periods including the Hortus Bulborium in Linnen (The Netherlands) where Tee seasonally collects tulip petals for her work, and among ceremonial networks and oceanic textile trades. The Tampan Tulips series echo the mirrored motifs of woven Palepai ‘ship cloths’ that emerged from Lampung Sumartra, albeit many examples are now held in Anglo-European ethnographic museums today.

Guests of the program include researcher and critic Sophie Williamson who contributed to the catalogue and has accompanied Tee on tulip gathering visits, as well as Dr. Fanny Wonu Veys who is Curator Oceania at the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden and author of Unwrapping Tongan Barkcloth Encounters, Creativity and Female Agency, Textiles (Bloomsbury, 2017). The conversation will be moderated by curator and researcher Christel Vesters, and will include responses by the publication designer Cleo Tsw as well as by Jennifer Tee herself.

Visitors can also arrive earlier at 6PM, to enjoy the performance of Transient Shroud / Being Less Human, conceived by Jennifer Tee together with choreographer Mire Lee.

The exhibition Still Shifting, Mother Field was commissioned and produced by Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam and Secession, Vienna. The exhibition was on view in Vienna from 16 September to 6 November 2022, and in Rotterdam from 20 January to 21 May 2023.