Come Closer: Renée Green’s São Paulo Auroras

Slow Walking in Lisbon, 1995. Film still
Slow Walking in Lisbon, 1995. Film still

Questions of where and how to live in these times, in this present. This is what each of us continues to face. How do we do it? How do we continue? How will we create the next endeavor? How will we create our lives?

Renée Green, Come Closer (2008)

On September 14th, 2024, artist and Professor Renée Green’s Aproxime-se: Perceptos, her first solo exhibition in Brazil, opened in auroras, an art space dedicated to artist’s projects located in São Paulo’s neighborhood of Morumbi.

After a site visit in early 2024, Green mindfully selected for this exhibition three bodies of work from different decades that resonate with auroras’ modernist architecture, as well as with the artist’s ongoing poetic, historical, and personal relation to Brazil.

Aproxime-se: Perceptos, 2024. Installation view, auroras, São Paulo. Image: Ding Musa
Renée Green. O Equador se moveu, from Space Poem #12 (O Equador se moveu), 2024. PolyDuck, 27 x 17 1/2 in. Image: Ding Musa

Upon entering the house, a projection room sets the tone for the exhibition with a short film. A poetic meditation on distance, Come Closer (2008) is a short and peripatetic film, casting an affective web between the locations of Lisbon, San Francisco and Brazil. Through its Portuguese narration, the film recasts Green’s ongoing relationship with the Lusophone world as a visceral reminder of the complexity of intertwined relations and how history resides in the present.

At the house’s entrance, Relations: Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil (2009) presents a set of hanging banners tracing the African diasporic flows between the United States and Brazilian popular music and culture, while a nearby sculptural element presents a short video displayed on an iPod considering mediated distances: through voice and images accessed via magazines and radio broadcasts, the artist attempts at “coming closer” to her brother Derrick Green, lead singer of the Brazilian band Sepultura.

Bonvenon!, 2005. PVC banner, 118 x 39 in. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Relations (Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil), 2009. Two single-sided polynylon banners, wood sculptural element, iPod, video. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Slow Walking in Lisbon, 1995. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Relations (Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil), 2009. Two single-sided polynylon banners, wood sculptural element, iPod, video. Installation detail. Image: Ding Musa

At auroras’ library, Commemorative Toile (Brasil) (2024) is a seductive mise-en-scène created by modernist furniture upholstered with Green’s Commemorative Toile (1992-1993), a 18th Century textile pattern repurposed by the artist as a textile and wallpaper to reveal complex histories from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Above this elegant presentation, a Space Poem specifically created for this exhibition floats from the library’s railing.

Aproxime-se: Perceptos, 2024. Installation view, auroras, São Paulo. Image: Ding Musa
Commemorative Toile: Brasil, 2024. Wallpaper, upholstered furniture, plant. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Space Poem #11 (The Equator Has Moved), 2024 & Space Poem #12 (O Equador se moveu), 2024. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Renée Green. Excerpt from Space Poem #12 (O Equador se moveu), 12 double-sided banners, PolyDuck; each banner 27 x 171/2 in

Sound works, a film, a Space Poem, and a series of prints occupy auroras’ entrance, upstairs rooms, and its main space. At the epicenter of these works resides Green’s film Begin Again, Begin Again (2015), a reflection on living and dying during the span of the 128 years between 1887 to 2015; in the film, the work of architect R.M. Schindler is invoked via his 1912 manifesto, Modern Architecture: A Program. Yet, the film’s numbered pronouncements are interrupted by another consciousness’ musings on the strangeness of survival, while in auroras’ garden a concealed voice whispers a litany of vanished gardens…

Renée Green. Space Architecture, 2015. Letterpress, 22 × 18 in. Image: Ding Musa
Space Poem #10 (Anos & depois), 2024. Twenty-eight double-sided banners, polyester nylon and thread. Each banner 27 x 17 1/2 in. Installation view. Image: Ding Musa
Aproxime-se: Perceptos, 2024. Installation view, auroras, São Paulo. Image: Ding Musa
Aproxime-se: Perceptos, 2024. Installation view, auroras, São Paulo. Image: Ding Musa
Vanished Gardens, 2004. Installation view at auroras' garden. Image: Free Agent Media

A video conversation between Renée Green and ACT alum Pedro Zylbersztajn will be posted shortly on auroras’ website, while a publication in English and Portuguese is forthcoming.

Aproxime-se: Perceptos runs through November 30, 2024. More information: auroras.

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