Screening and Conversation with Renée Green [NEW TIME AND VENUE]

Saturday, October 28, 2023 at 1:00pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall

FREE!

A screening of ED/HF, a 33 minute video by Renée Green '81, will be followed by a conversation between Green and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00, curator of the exhibition No Title: Relays and Relations. Works by Renée Green and Sol LeWitt, which brings together recent artworks by Green and wall drawings by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), as part of Wesleyan University's Homecoming + Family Weekend. The talk will be followed by a light reception in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. 

As a student at Wesleyan, Green participated in a course taught by Professor of Art History Emeritus John Paoletti that focused on LeWitt’s art collection, which resulted in the exhibition No Title: The Collection of Sol LeWitt in the Davison Art Center (October 21 through December 20, 1981). Describing this experience as a seminal moment in her experience as an emerging artist, Green is also interested in what similar acts of aesthetic exchange and support could be offered to younger artists today, thereby relaying the transmission of conceptualism in new directions. The exhibition will feature works from across Green's career including a newly-created Space Poem #9, and three wall drawings by LeWitt, two of which will be installed by current Wesleyan students. Elements of the exhibition will also be on display in the second floor lobby of the gallery, the Center for the Arts office, in the Wesleyan Library located at 252 Church Street in Middletown, and online.

For more information about related events, please visit the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery website.

ED/HF was previously streamed online from September through November 2020 as part of the exhibition "A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS." 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.

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