Inevitable Distances, a comprehensive survey of Renée Green’s practice from the early 1980s until now, is simultaneously taking place at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and daadgalerie in Berlin.
Since the late 1980s, Renée Green’s multifaceted practice has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory, and circuits of cultural exchange. Her writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works trace and interrogate the power of culture and its entanglement with other structures—among them, language, architecture, literature, and constitutions of selfhood—while at the same time indicating other ways of being and becoming.
The largest presentation of Green’s work since 2010, Inevitable Distances spans multiple floors of KW and daadgalerie, and presents recent productions in conversation with some of Green’s earliest and rarely exhibited works, all along probing the distribution and relay of art and ideas, how these are braided with histories of migration and legacies of displacement, as well as the aesthetic forms and poetics that stem from these.
Indicating the encounters and distances travelled in a life’s journey, Inevitable Distances puts Green’s artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation.
A booklet prepared by the artist accompanies the exhibition at the daadgalerie. Films by Renée Green will also be shown on various dates as part of a public screening program.
Green’s writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships with language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time indicating other ways of being and becoming. Inevitable Distances presents recent productions in conversation with some of Green’s earliest and rarely exhibited works. Referencing the encounters made and the distances travelled in a life’s journey, the exhibition puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation. Through the juxtapositions of past and present, a paradox emerges: How do we bring back the dislocated and the dead, not in order to chase away the ghosts, but to welcome them and grant them “the right to a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice”?
Inevitable Distances is accompanied by a book of the same name, published jointly by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Hatje Cantz Verlag, and KW. Designed by Carolina Aboarrage, the publication contains contributions by Renée Green, Kathrin Bentele, Howie Chen, Emma Hedditch, Katherine McKittrick, Taylor Le Melle, Ima-Abasi Okon, and others, and is edited by Mason Leaver-Yap. The book will be available in early 2022. The publication is supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office.
The exhibition runs from October 23rd, 2021 to January 9th, 2022. A series of public programs, conversations, and screenings will take place in both KW and daadgalerie. Please visit their websites for further information.
About Renée Green
Renée Green, born 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, lives and works in Somerville, MA and New York City. In 1993 she was a fellow of the Artists-in-Berlin Program. Green’s exhibitions, videos, and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennials, and festivals. Her books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010), and Ongoing Becomings (2009). Green is a professor at ACT, the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, School of Architecture + Planning. In fall 2019, she was the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. At the invitation of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Renée Green will return to Berlin from October to December 2021.
