Artist Talk: Renée Green '81

Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6:00pm
Zoom Webinar

FREE! RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Artist Renée Green '81 will speak about her practice in conversation with Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee '00 and Paul McLaren ’21. Green's 33 minute video "ED/HF" is streaming online through Sunday, November 22, 2020 as part of the exhibition A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS. Talk co-sponsored by Wesleyan's Department of Art and Art History.

Stream the video "ED/HF" online on the A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS exhibition website.

Renée Green breaks down timelines of all magnitudes: modernist progress narratives, art historical canons, and lifespans. In her video "ED/HF" (2017), Green foregrounds the life and memory of her friend and collaborator Harun Farocki. With the tenor of a contemporary installation, "ED/HF" functions as a memorial, of sorts, both lifting Farocki’s life out of distant memory into the present, and creating a dialogue between two friends. Green, who calls the piece “a film as a conversation,” says that she “wanted it to be blurry.” The video oscillates between different voices and conceptual anchors: America and Germania, institutions and individuals, and distance and intimacy. Green’s scholarly enterprises are united with creative expression as both artists examine the impact of migration and displacement on their respective practices. The blurring in Green’s video best articulates the lack of precision that emerges when trying to piece together someone’s life. Reviewing materials and memories to build a portrait of a lost collaborator is always evolving and always incomplete. Video streaming courtesy of the artist, FAM, and Bortolami Gallery.

Renée Green's seven minute digital film "Americas: Veritas" (2018) was screened in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Tuesday, September 8 through Saturday, September 19, 2020.

Image: Renée Green. "ED/HF," 2017. Film still. Courtesy of the artist, FAM, and Bortolami Gallery, New York.