Ten columns made of massive, polished Carrara marble, varying in height from 400 to 500 cm. The totems are located next to the metro track between stations Ganzenhoef and Kraaiennest and bear phrases such as Local Myths, The Everyday and Walk of Life.
The area where Totem Today is situated is a transitional space. The double metro viaduct is a powerful monumental gesture in urban Bijlmer, while at the same time the majestic colonnade forms an empty area with an almost rural feeling. The bold viaduct evokes thoughts of dynamism, travel, moving from one spot to another. The area under the viaduct is a noman’s land. In this area Jennifer Tee placed ten marble columns, ‘totems’. With this she refers to sacred objects with magical or religious connotations. These contemporary totems bear phrases, referring to space and time in a poetic way, such as ‘Local Myths’ and ‘Open Horizon’. Together they mark what Tee calls a ‘rite de passage’. In the classic sense, a rite of passage is a ritual that marks the transition to, for example, a new civil status, such as an 18th birthday or a wedding. The slender totems do not compete with the monumentality of the metro line; they are like spirits, as it were, of the concrete columns of the viaduct. At the same time you might wonder which columns came first or which columns have more meaning: the colossal concrete pillars of progress and speed or the more modest bearers of words such as ‘Belonging’ and ‘The Everyday’.
With Totem Today Jennifer Tee intents to create awareness of what at first sight is an not defined area, thereby charging (or ‘uploading’) our daily surroundings with poetic meaning.
Jennifer Tee
1973, Arnhem, NL. Lives and works in Amsterdam Zuidoost, NL
Though she was born in Arnhem and now lives in Amsterdam, Jennifer Tee has worked and exhibited in places as far afield as Vilnius, Xiamen, Los Angeles and Sao Paolo. Tee is the child of a Dutch-British mother and a Chinese father who grew up in Indonesia. Perhaps it is this background that enables her to forge bridges between the most diverse of cultures with a light touch and a sense of naturalness. She does so in what are frequently enormous spatial installations, whose various components have been made with love and meticulous care in different parts of the world. Tee’s artworks occupy a twilight area in which mundane, tangible reality is gradually transformed into another, wholly enigmatic world.
