Artist and ACT Professor Renée Green’s work is featured in Tried & True, a group exhibition taking place at Juf, a poetry project space located in Madrid.
Curated by Bea Ortega Botas, the exhibition “consider[s] the role that settings, corporality, and inadequacy play within the various forms of narrating and informing that structure our experiences and political environments […] Today, this query becomes more incisive: which things do we accept getting wrong and which ones urgently require absolute accuracy; which vocabularies and languages we use to these ends; which sets of social coordinates —past and present—frame our historical moment and role; and what to make of our own frustration and complicity with the expectations placed on the informative and political syntax faced with events that will change everything forever.”
For Tried & True, Green has re-conceived an early work: Road ____: Part I (1994), which was produced for the 1994 influential exhibition Codido y crudo (The Raw and the Cooked). Curated by Dan Cameron for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Codido y crudo was one of the earlier exhibitions attempting to trace the shift in contemporary art towards a less parochial approach to the production of art within a global perspective. Other artists in the exhibition were Rirkrit Tiravanija, Xu Bing, Juan Dávila, Jimmie Durham, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Rogelio López Cuenca, Mona Hatoum, Martin Kippenberger, Gabriel Orozco, and many others.
Green’s contribution to Cocido y crudo has now been rethought for Juf, and consists of numerous copies of the artist’s novel Camino Road–presented in a display shelf and available to the public–a framed poster with the novel’s enlarged cover and back cover, and Green’s 1994 video Camino Road, which depicts the artist’s interactions and lived experiences in the early 1990s in Madrid, Sevilla, Brooklyn, and Cleveland.
Camino Road, a bilingual novel in English and Spanish, has been described as “a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian,” and it is accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s.
As Ortega Botas writes: “A few years ago, coinciding with the opening of an exhibition at the New Museum in New York that looked back at art, pop culture and politics in 1993, Renée Green asked herself what was wanted of 1993 in 2013. I’m inspired by this question and ask myself what does our moment want from a selection of works decided months ago, and what can this precise time expect from art.”
Other artists in Tried & True are Carmela García, James Sturkey, and Gray Wielebinski.
The exhibition opened on November 18th, 2023, and runs until January 4th, 2024. On the day of the opening, a collective reading of Camino Road took place in English and Spanish; incidentally, the reading was attended by ACT Alumni Cristóbal García Belmont.
More information: Tried & True @ Juf
