Formations. Thinking about these now. Both of ours. Separate. Not knowing. Not born.

Later finding.

What I can say before forgetting.”

Renée Green, ED/HF

On November 14th, Renée Green’s latest film, ED/HF (2017) will be premiered at the Harvard Art Museum’s Menschel Hall. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Mason Leaver-Yap, former Walker Art Center’s Bentson Moving Image Scholar. Part of Green’s ongoing residency at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, ED/HF’s screening will be the fifth installment of her ongoing Pacing residency at CCVA.

Commissioned by the Walker Art Center and conceived as a “film as a conversation,” Green’s ED/HF is a cinematic meditation on lived experience, writing, film, and ongoing becomings. On its surface, ED/HF could be described as a double portrait of Green, and artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki. But ED/HF’s primary focus is guided less by a binary comparison of these two personas, and more by the pair’s personal experiences of migration and the legacies of displacement that have affected both the artists and their work.

Featuring a reading performance by artist and current ACT graduate participant, Nolan Dennis Oswald, ED/HF is a palimpsestic work, touching on the many thresholds opened while thinking about an artist’s life and work. Questions of language, history, and image reproduction technologies are rendered into a touching threnody, a mournful celebration of the power of art, film and poetry.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Green and Mason Leaver-Yap, author of Telling Time, an essay accompanying the film commission’s streaming at the Walker Art Center’s website during the 2017 Summer. In their essay, Leaver-Yap write: “To come closer to ED/HF’s intention is to demand one stem the desire to grasp at the singularity of meaning, and to refuse attempts to take (violent) possession of knowledge and fix it into a known history. Rather, the film gives over to the sprawling complexity of not-knowing, that all-too human quality of imprecision that shapes one’s subjectivity just as much as the presence of knowledge.”

The screening and conversation will take place on Tuesday November 14, 2017, 7-9 pm, at the Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Menschel Hall, Lower Level, use entrance on Broadway Street.