Renée Green
Her pluralistic practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, architecture, photography, prints, video, film, websites, and sound, which normally converge in highly layered and complex installations.
Green's work adopts the form of complex and highly formalized installations in which ideas, historical events and narratives, as well as cultural artifacts, are examined from myriad perspectives.
By beginning with these objects or places, and the contexts in which they appeared, it was possible to detect the intricate working of certain ideologies which were being put forth [...] and to attempt to decipher the contradictory pleasure which might accompany them.
Using this fabric, Green constructs installations reminiscent of museum period rooms, with chairs, settees, drapes, and wallpaper crafted from the pinkish-red toile.
In each of her projects, Green produces works of art in different mediums like photography [Secret (1994–2006)], prints [Code: Survey], films [Some Chance Operations (1999); Wavelinks (2002), Elsewhere?
[10] As a result of the complex web of relations and conceptual links among the materials and projects, these normally take place during a duration of time, and in different locations, in which the same theme is presented in different formats.
Green has assembled numerous books and writings over the years, including: Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014), published by Duke University Press; Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010), produced in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Ongoing Becomings (2009) represents 20 years of Green's work, and was organized by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003); Between and Including (2001); Shadows and Signals (2000); Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books; Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (1996); After the Ten Thousand Things (1994); Camino Road (1994); and World Tour (1993).
This artwork, one of the first in which Green combined texts and images, attempted to evoke the position of early nineteenth-century audiences vis-a-vis bodies put on display.
Green enlarged an engraving of Sarah Baartman's body to life-size and overlaid it with wooden slats stamped with Sir Francis Galton's description of measuring the buttocks of a "Hottentot" woman.
Green highlighted the simultaneously "objective" and "subjective" character of this text by signaling each element with distinct typefaces, either capitalized Times Roman or cursive script.
The central features of this artwork are a soapbox marked with two footprints and placed in front of a wall-mounted, ladder-like construction whose slats are stamped with two texts describing Sarah Baartman.
The soapbox and slatted structure are flanked by a klieg light and a peepbox containing a reproduction of an early nineteenth-century French print showing European viewers ogling the "Hottentot Venus."
This artwork builds on several features of Sa Main Charmante: it uses interspersed texts that reference the sideshow/stage entrance of Sarah Baartman, as well as, this time, that of the celebrated dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker—Baker's voice, singing "Voulez-vous de la canne" ("Would you like some sugar cane?
[13] These texts can be read on the slats of a wooden platform, reminiscent of the crude constructions used to display and sell slaves,[17] that the viewer accesses via a short stair.
Once there, the viewer finds themselves spotlit, their shadow thrown against an attached scrim, and looked at through an illuminated hole in the floor by a pair of motorized, spectacled eyes that wink.
[13][18] Import-Export Funk Office (1992) is a subjective map of the flow of hip hop music and related culture between New York City, Los Angeles and Cologne.
In this project commissioned by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Green created an immersive environment in which through drawings, sound, banners and films, ideas of islands, physical or mental, are explored.
1887–1929 (2015), a single channel forty-five-minute video montage interweaving images of the house with historic footage, oceanic tidal scenes, and various architectural sites.
Nagel Draxler writes, "Combining aspects of continuity and rupture, the installation served as a relatively immediate illustration of what Green—borrowing a term from literary theorist Mary Louise Pratt—has called the "contact zone," referring to the encounter staged in her practice between disparate people, cultures, and events.
From March 6–7, 2014 Green presented her two-year collaboration project with John Akomfrah, OBE, and Lina Gopaul called Cinematic Migrations.
This project "poses the notion of “migrations" in relation to "the cinematic" in an intentionally porous juxtaposition, conceived to allow a wide range of questions, interpretations and permutations to emerge.
[22] On September 24, 2019, Pacing, her two-year project at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, focused on the building's iconic design by Le Corbusier.
Green acknowledges conditions of displacement and residency, institutional memory, subjective experience, architectural modernism, notions of progress, and the certainty of decay, all the while reevaluating how time is manifested.
[27] Green was a recipient of Anonymous Was A Women award in 2021 alongside fellow female artists Coco Fusco, Dyani White Hawk, Autumn Knight, and Judithe Hernández, among others.
