Tenant of Culture is the moniker of Hendrickje Schimmel, a Dutch artist working in the space between sculpture and couture. Her objects are assembled with the flying tempo of fashion production, but these garments are clearly not factory made.

August 4, 2025 - HOST: Tenant of Culture presents newly commissioned works by Hendrickje Schimmel alongside a selection of recent works in an installation that explores the tension between seductive, consumer-facing displays and spaces less visible in the fashion industry, such as production factories and ...

Tenant of Culture is the name of the practice of Hendrickje Schimmel (b. NL, 1990). She has completed a BA in Fashion Design at ArtEZ School of the Arts, Arnhem, NL followed by an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.

April 4, 2025 - Operating under the name Tenant of Culture, she essentially runs the production process in reverse, taking secondhand garments nearing the end of their life cycles and summarily “unmaking” them.

15K Followers, 4,177 Following, 266 Posts - toc (@tenantofculture) on Instagram: ""

April 6, 2020 - Tenant of Culture deconstructs fashion’s political and social role by analysing the production, distribution and use of products through the lens of philosophy and critical theory, addressing questions of ideology, labour and monetization.

Interview by Vanessa Thill Tenant of Culture, the creative moniker of Hendrickje Schimmel, is the kind of artist we need today. Raw materials are anathema to her. She’s experimenting with how to di...

Get the app, and keep track of artists’ markets. ... Critiquing consumer culture and wastefulness, Tenant of Culture’s work challenges frameworks for apparel production, distribution, and advertising. She was the recipient of the 2020 Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize with Frieze.

December 11, 2024 - Tenant of Culture is the name of the practice of Hendrickje Schimmel. She has completed a BA in Fashion Design at ArtEZ School of the Arts, Arnhem, NL followed by an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.

April 16, 2025 - Tenant of Culture, the anonym for Dutch artist Hendrickje Schimmel, realised an ambitious new site-specific installation for Camden Art Centre, her largest...

October 8, 2020 - Practical, emotional, psychological, cultural, or societal, the signs and symbols embedded within the fabrics, that shroud our form, give clues about us that far surpass any other everyday practice we engage in. This week I spoke with Hendrickje Schimmel, an artist who works under the moniker Tenant of Culture.

September 8, 2023 - Fabricated or “pre-consumer” destruction is the point of tension through which Tenant of Culture continues the exploration of the cognitive dissonance between “the individual relationship that we have with the garments versus the industry in which they are produced.” “I try to really hone in one particular material process and then expand from there,” the artist explains, “looking at certain historical events in relation to that, and then also connecting them to contemporary manufacturing.” By placing contemporary aesthetics – like purposefully destroyed garments which defined last year’s ‘avant apocalypse’ trend à la Balenciaga – within an expansive historical context, Tenant of Culture makes fashion tangible and material, a continuing modality rather than an ephemeral concept.

1/111 Tenant of Culture, Haul (series) 2023 Plastic bags, garments, thread, ribbon, 32 x 27 cm

October 6, 2022 - Ahead of a major new installation at London’s Camden Art Centre, we speak to Tenant of Culture, whose art-meets-fashion practice dissects the darker sides of our material world

June 27, 2021 - Tenant of Culture, Puzzlecut Boot Miscellaneous, 2021, recycled shoe lining, textile scraps, belt, labels, acrylic paint, padding, shoe last, glue, thread, 51 x 34 x 11 cm

Together with Mateusz Szymanówka, he runs the performative and discursive program To Be Real, which examines the relationship between contemporary performance and club culture. Since 2022, he has been co-creating Kem School - a program of joint learning through experiments and reflection on social choreography, performance and methods of queer and feminist activities.

Publisher: Soft OpeningYear: 2021Format: SoftcoverEdition: SecondCondition: NewTenant of Culture is the artistic practice of Hendrickje Schimmel (b. 1990, Arnhem, Netherlands), who lives and works in London, UK.

September 14, 2022 - As Tenant of Culture, Schimmel has become known for her sustained exploration of the fashion industry, overproduction, and the intense cyclical nature of trends, with her skilled and materials-driven practice transforming used and discarded garments and accessories into complex, amalgamated sculptures and textiles.

The word’s origins can be found in the 1970s Italian workerist movement, yet when translated to the language of fashion and applied to the realm of aesthetics, it loses some of its bite. Why? Because it is in fashion’s nature to fetishise: “Fashion instantly mocks sensible inventions in clothing,” writes Anne Hollander, “subjecting them to unfunctional usage as soon as they appear, so they can seem authentically desirable and never merely convenient.”(4) Fashion, in its drive to produce profit, mines culture and aesthetics. Tenant of Culture, in turn, mines fashion, breaking it down, turning it inside out, looking at it anew.

March 4, 2025 - The peculiar moniker of artist Tenant of Culture comes from The Practice of Everyday Life by French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau. The book is about people individualizing the larger hegemonic systems they live in and how they ricochet ...