1985-2019
Knowledge Transference III (when the one to author the cut is gone, a small hole in the shape of a portal forms)
Jeneen Frei Njootli has been working and living on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Skwxwu7mesh territories (Vancouver) for the last ten years. Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited their work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways, and the bush. They work across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and are a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has collaborated with James Luna, Dana Claxton, Olivia Whetung, Tsēmā Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart, Lindsay Lachance, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, and her brother Stanley Grafton Njootli. Frei Njootli has been awarded the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize and the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize, and was a Sobey Art Prize finalist in 2018.
Photography, 4.87 x 2.43m. Sound installation and performance.
Jeneen Frei Njootli’s installations and live sound performances are sonic landscapes; frequencies and living energies that carry knowledge, information and stories related to the land, history, and culture of her Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, located in northern Yukon. For La Ferme du Buisson Art Centre, Frei Njootli presented a large photographic vinyl banner created by pressing beadwork their grandmother made into their skin. In a live sound performance midway through the exhibition, they transformed a hide scraper into a sonic tool to scrape the image away from the wall, leaving behind only its sonic residue. This work honours the art of Gwich’in women, especially the women of their family, and at the same time, protects it—and them—from consumption by a capitalist and patriarchal system that has long enacted itself in the form of violence upon the bodies of Indigenous women.
Related Program
Take Care at La Ferme du Buisson
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The Blackwood
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Road
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
[email protected]
(905) 828-3789
The galleries are open. Hours of operation: Monday–Saturday, 12–5pm.
Holiday hours: regular gallery hours are in effect until and including Saturday, December 6. The galleries will then be closed for the holidays, except for regular hours on Saturday, December 13. In 2026, the galleries reopen Monday, January 5.
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.