Echo Delay Reverb: Renée Green at Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Artist and Professor Renée Green’s work is prominently featured in Palais de Tokyo’s group exhibition Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought.

Aiming at exploring the history of the transatlantic circulation of forms and ideas, Echo Delay Reverb argues that art in the United States catalyzed the revolutionary energies of thinkers, activists, and poets who transcended genres and profoundly reshaped perspectives on the world, from Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Monique Wittig, Pierre Bourdieu, and Édouard Glissant.

Green’s work is represented by her seminal installations Seen (1990) and Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words) (2009).

In Seen, the viewer is encouraged to climb steps onto a platform while a floodlight is directed at them as they traverse the platform, casting their shadows onto a film screen as they read rubber-stamped text on the platform’s planks with alternating “scientific” descriptions of Saartje Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name “Hottentot Venus,” and early 20^th century’s American performer Josephine Baker.

In the middle of the platform, the text is interrupted by a motorized blinking eye producing “an illusion of being watched from below,” while Baker’s 1920s musical hit Voulez-vous de la cane? plays in the gallery in an ambiance loop.

As Alexander Alberro wrote in a 2000 essay about Green’s work, “in obliging the viewer to walk back and forth on the platform in order to read the texts, Green also put the viewer on stage, as it were. Vulnerable to the gaze of everyone else in the room, casting a shadow onto the white screen, the viewer now became implicated in the spectacle.”

Echo Delay Reverb features works by several generations of artists; key historical artists such as Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mike Kelley, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tom Burr, and Cindy Sherman are featured alongside younger artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Sky Hopinka, and Cici Wu.

Accompanying the exhibition, a scholarly publication edited by art historian Elvan Zabunyan and the curator of the exhibition features an in-depth exchange between Zabunyan and Green about French artistic and discursive networks, “Se jour des categories: entretien avec Renée Green.”

An excerpt from Green’s responses:

“When you ask about trajectories–what would be the way in which I encountered French cultural forms–I would still argue for these being introduced through music and through films. Works that were from Francophone Africa or the French Caribbean were also part of my exposure during the ’70s, during my studies during that time, learning about them, for example, in terms of surrealism, Aimé Césaire.”

“So yes, I think it’s important to shift how people understand cultural relays, to foster a more complex way of perceiving all these relations.”

The publication also includes interviews with art historian Huey Copeland and Judith Butler, as well as a variety of essays by authors like Catherine Malabou, Adam Schatz, or Aria Dean.

Echo Delay Reverb was curated by Naomi Beckwith with Palais de Tokyo’s curatorial team, James Horton, Amandine Nana, and François Piron. The exhibition opened in October 25, 2025 and will run until February 15, 2026.

More information here and here.