That changing relationship to history — personal, artistic, institutional, and even geological — runs throughout Green’s practice and The Equator Has Moved. The exhibition brings together works made across more than three decades with new commissions conceived for Dia Beacon, allowing Green to pursue questions over time to encounter one another again under changed circumstances.

It is not, Green stresses, a retrospective.

“It’s a thoughtful combination of works from different time periods,” she says. “It’s not a survey exhibition.”

Instead, works from different moments coexist, producing connections that aren’t necessarily chronological. Some of the historical works included in the exhibition had not been seen in the United States since they were first presented decades ago.

Seeing them again has been significant for Green herself. “It’s been major, as an experience,” she says, “to see these different works, new works and earlier works all together.”

Diedrich Diederichsen is particularly significant to the story Green tells about these intersecting histories.

Green and the German cultural critic have been engaged in an artistic and intellectual exchange since the early 1990s. Diederichsen became a central figure in Green’s Import/Export Funk Office, first presented in Cologne in 1992, a sprawling project examining the movement and translation of hip-hop music, information, cultural forms, and ideas between Germany and the United States.

Green approached Diederichsen, then editor of the German music magazine Spex, almost as an anthropological subject: an artist observing the cultural critic as he collected, traveled, listened, read, and interpreted culture.

“Following him, and observing him, he became an almost anthropological case study,” Green recalls, “for me, as an artist, observing the cultural critic.”

Their conversations moved among music, art, criticism, and cultural exchange. Green introduced Diederichsen to writers and critics she knew in the United States, including Greg Tate and Joe Wood of The Village Voice, the legendary New York independent weekly. The resulting project accumulated approximately 26 hours of interviews and footage made across New York, Los Angeles, Cologne, and other locations, and were presented in an archive-like shelving structure that included books and magazines from both Diedrichsen and Green’s libraries, as well as videos on monitors, a projection, and sound.

The conversation did not end with the work. Diederichsen later participated in Green’s Wavelinks, a 2002 video installation focusing on electronically-produced music, and Green in turn contributed to projects organized by Diederichsen, such as Loving the Alien, a milestone conference organized by Diedrichsen that took place in Berlin in 1997. Likewise, Green had invited Diedrichsen to participate in her 1994 conference Negotiations in the Contact Zone, in New York.

Their exchange has continued across years, cities, exhibitions, publications, and changing cultural contexts.

More than three decades later, that history makes Diederichsen’s presence at Dia on September 27 particularly resonant. The conversation is not simply an occasion to assess a completed exhibition: it brings one of Green’s longtime interlocutors into a space where works and questions from those earlier decades have themselves been made newly present.

Green’s relationship to Dia reaches backward in a different way.

For years before exhibiting there, she had been attentive to artists whose works became associated with the Dia Art Foundation and its collection — artists she encountered through study, exhibitions, books, and, eventually, personal exchange.

“I’m mentioning all of these as a way of giving a background to an ongoing relationship and interest,” Green says, describing her connections to artists who have passed through Dia. It is an international group, she notes, including artists whose work had interested her since adolescence.

To now exhibit within that institutional context has shifted her position relative to the history she once observed from outside.

Green’s exhibition occupies two large central galleries and an adjoining corridor at Dia Beacon. Moving through the museum creates literal encounters between her work and that of artists with whom she has been in dialogue.

As exhibitions elsewhere at Dia changed during the almost two-year run of The Equator Has Moved, those relationships changed too. Green points to the presence of work by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, whose work has been installed in Dia in proximity to her exhibition, among the artists whose experiments with color, structure, participation, and space resonate with questions in her own work.

The relationships aren’t straightforward citations or lines of influence, they are closer to conversations that continue to change as the works are placed in new proximity.

“There have just been different moments that allow this kind of intergenerational crossing,” Green says, “and that’s been very gratifying.”

That intergenerational and temporal crossing is built into the structure of The Equator Has Moved itself.

The exhibition, which opened in March 2025 after approximately three years of development, brings rarely seen works from the late 1980s and early 1990s into relation with reconfigured works and commissions created specifically for Dia.

Among the earlier works are paintings concerned with color and installations such as Neutral/Natural (1990), in which questions of classification, perception, and cultural systems emerge. Across these works, Green sees recurring concerns: not identical subjects repeated over time, but questions capable of changing as the historical conditions around them change.

Color is one example.

Green describes thinking about color in an unusually expansive sense: through physics, history, language, social meaning, and visual perception. Bringing historical works concerned with those questions into proximity with more recent works allows relationships to emerge that might otherwise remain difficult to see.

When works from different periods appear together, Green says, “it’s more kaleidoscopic…. You can understand different angles or dimensions of what was being addressed.”

The exhibition therefore resists the conventional logic of artistic development in which one period supersedes another. Earlier works aren’t there simply to explain how Green arrived at the present, they retain their own questions while acquiring new relationships to what came afterward.

Across the exhibition, Green identifies an “ongoing questioning” around “forms of classification, thinking about nature, thinking about Earth, and geology.”

Those questions move among media as well. Paintings sit in relation to architecture, sound, film, text, and moving images. Relationships are produced through the experience of encountering the works in relation.

“When you see the actual objects and you hear them,” Green says, “it becomes more complicated, more complex.” The task isn’t necessarily to resolve that complexity, but “to see what relationships might exist between them.”

One of those relationships begins with geology.

Green traces the phrase The Equator Has Moved to her reading of John McPhee, the longtime New Yorker writer whose work has frequently explored geology and the natural world.

Green recalls encountering a passage describing travel with a geologist and the disorienting realization that, over geological time, the apparent fixity of geographical coordinates becomes unstable. The equator, from another temporal perspective, has moved.

The idea caught her attention, and Green began connecting it with other things she was thinking about at the time, including Jorge Luis Borges, Brazil, cartography, time, and geography.

“To literally reference the equator having moved is something I thought would be interesting to consider,” she says.

But the phrase also opened a larger question: How is geography designated in the first place?

Green began thinking about the formation of maps and borders, the systems used to measure and divide the Earth, and the possibility that ways of perceiving and representing geography that appear objective can also contain elements of subjectivity, traces of the societies that envisioned these scientific and taxonomical systems. In this instance, the geological becomes conceptual, historical, and political without ceasing to be geological.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, images of volcanic eruptions, coastlines, and the movement of continental plates return viewers to Earth on a scale far beyond an individual human life. Green’s film Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009) is one point at which those ideas about time, Earth, and changing configurations become visible.

And the phrase “The Equator Has Moved” appears within another of the exhibition’s major new works.

For Dia, Green created Space Poem #14 (Long Poem in Four Parts) (2025), a large-scale work extending through the upper reaches of the exhibition galleries. Green’s Space Poems are an ongoing series of works combining words, color, space, and architecture. For Dia, she brought several strands developed between 2020 and 2025 into a single composition.

Space Poem #14 comprises four constituent Space Poems: Space Poem 11.1 (The Equator Has Moved) (2024), Space Poem #13 (Us Together) (2025), Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May Words) (2020) and Space Poem #9 (Today) (2023).

The work’s scale changes the encounter; rather than reading a poem on a page, visitors move beneath and through language dispersed across architecture: words become spatial, reading becomes physical and durational.

And Space Poem #14 will outlast the exhibition in another way, as it is now part of Dia’s permanent collection, along with four of Green’s works from 1990 also present in the exhibition: Color I, Color III, Neutral/Natural, and Which?

Collected now alongside works by artists with whom Green has been engaged for decades, the acquisition alters her relationship to Dia’s institutional history: she is no longer only looking at it, she is now part of it.

And there is another beginning to this story.

As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, in 1980 Green participated in a yearlong seminar involving the art collection that the artist Sol LeWitt had placed at the Wadsworth Atheneum. The students worked with the collection’s material, cataloging and organizing it while contributing to an exhibition and accompanying publication.

Green wrote about Lawrence Weiner, Adrian Piper, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, her first published work.

Decades later, those early encounters have resurfaced in unexpected ways. Green’s work has continued to cross paths with artists she studied then; both Weiner and LeWitt are part of Dia’s collection, and a LeWitt’s walldrawing is currently installed near her work at Beacon. In addition, in 2023, an exhibition at Green’s alma mater, Wesleyan, also placed her work in conversation with LeWitt, who likewise exhibited there.

The recurrence isn’t lost on her. “It’s been coming full circle, in a way,” Green says.

But “circle” may not quite describe it. The pattern Green traces is less a return to the same point than an accumulation: people and ideas encountered at one moment return decades later, changed by everything that has happened in between.

It is one reason a conventional retrospective chronology would seem inadequate for the Dia project.

A new monograph offers another way into that accumulation.

Published by Dia and edited by Jordan Carter and Svetlana Kitto, Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved is the first comprehensive U.S. monograph devoted to Green’s work. It brings together essays by Alexander Alberro, Erika Balsom, Carter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Ann Goldstein, James Meyer, and Blake Oetting, with a foreword by Jessica Morgan.

Green describes the publication as an important complement to the physical exhibition. “Now that we have the book, it changes how it’s possible to look at the exhibition as well,” she says.

The publication historicizes Green’s work while placing it in relation to Dia’s own institutional and artistic histories. Its contributors span generations and bring different relationships to Green and her practice. Some have known the work for decades, and both Meyer and Alberro had already written about Green’s practice previously.

Describing her intention in selecting the contributing authors to the publication, Green recalls, for example, meeting Ann Goldstein in the context of her 1993 exhibition World Tour at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Goldstein therefore brings to the new publication the perspective of someone who encountered Green’s work within the international context from which some of the historical works now gathered at Dia first emerged.

Diederichsen brings another kind of proximity: not only as a critic examining the work after the fact, but as someone who has appeared inside Green’s work and intellectual life for more than 30 years. The book, like the exhibition, becomes a polyphonic project.

The Equator Has Moved has itself unfolded alongside other projects, and Green is reluctant to treat those projects as entirely separate.

During the years surrounding the exhibition, she has worked on a commission with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, whose relationship to Dia is itself significant: Dia serves as custodian of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Green has visited both works in Utah.

In 2025, she completed another commission at Western Washington University, whose public art collection likewise includes artists represented in Dia’s orbit, and during the preparation of the Dia exhibition her work entered into conversation with LeWitt at Wesleyan.

And during the run of the Beacon exhibition, Dia presented Green’s Americas : Veritas at Dia Chelsea, a four-screen moving-image work that opened another facet of her practice.

For Green, these overlaps matter. “It’s been a very active time,” she says, “in terms of being able to focus on different facets of the work that were produced in different situations and at different times.”

The pattern is one of intersections rather than isolated projects.

Artists, institutions, works, and places recur. A connection to Smithson or Holt leads geographically to Utah and institutionally back to Dia and Western Washington University, which also holds Holt’s work. LeWitt leads backward to Green’s undergraduate years and forward again to Wesleyan and Dia Beacon. Diederichsen connects Cologne in 1992 with Beacon in 2026.

Seen this way, Green’s description of her practice as an ongoing conversation becomes almost literal.

That conversation will become public again on Sunday, September 27.

At noon, Green and Dia curator Jordan Carter will lead Dia members through The Equator Has Moved, discussing the works on view and reflecting on the exhibition’s development and extended run.

At 2 pm, Green and Carter will be joined by Diedrich Diederichsen for a public conversation in the Gerhard Richter gallery at Dia Beacon.

Diederichsen’s presence brings one of the exhibition’s underlying histories into the room. More than three decades after Import/Export Funk Office, the artist and critic return to conversation within an exhibition that has itself brought work from that period into dialogue with Green’s present.

And Carter, who invited Green to undertake the Dia commission and whose essay in the accompanying monograph provides historical grounding for the exhibition, represents another stage in that continuing set of ongoing exchanges.

The event takes place not after the exhibition, as a retrospective assessment, but while it remains active — while visitors can still move through the relationships Green has constructed among objects, images, sounds, colors, words, and spaces.

Again and again, Green’s account of The Equator Has Moved complicates the idea that history remains fixed behind us. A work from 1990 changes when encountered beside one from 2025; an artist first encountered through a book becomes a colleague, or an artistic peer in a museum collection; a conversation begun in Cologne continues in Beacon more than 30 years later. An equator moves.

Even the arrival of the monograph, seemingly an act of fixing a history into printed form, changes the way the still-unfolding exhibition can be seen.

Green has spent much of her sabbatical reflecting on the project as it approaches its conclusion. But conclusion, here, is probably the wrong word: the exhibition closes October 12; the works that have entered Dia’s collection remain. The book circulates; other projects continue. And the conversations — among people, works, places, histories, and generations — move elsewhere.

A Conversation with Renée Green, Diedrich Diederichsen, and Jordan Carter
Sunday, September 27, 2026
2 pm
Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York
Free with museum admission

The conversation marks the culminating weeks of Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved, on view at Dia Beacon through October 12, 2026.

Artist-led Closing Tour of Renée Green: The Equator Has Moved
Sunday, September 27, 2026
12–1 pm
Dia Beacon
Led by Renée Green and Dia curator Jordan Carter
Open to Dia members; advance RSVP requested.