Renée Green: Inevitable Distances

Inevitable Distances, a comprehensive survey of Renée Green’s practice from the early 1980s to the present day, is taking place concurrently at the daadgalerie and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, from October 22, 2021, to January 9, 2022. Green was a 1993/94 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellow. In 1995, the daadgalerie—then still located on Kurfürstenstraße—hosted her exhibition Miscellaneous.

At today’s daadgalerie, Inevitable Distances presents a restaging of Certain Miscellanies, a monumental photographic work that translated Green’s early 1990s European encounters and was first presented in her 1995 daadgalerie exhibition. This installation has now been recombined with her works Climates and Paradoxes and Selected Life Indexes, produced for the Einsteinjahr 2005, and her video Begin Again, Begin Again (2015), which is centered around Rudolph M. Schindler’s architecture. The project Inevitable Distances highlights Green’s ongoing engagement with circuits of exchange between Europe and the Americas.

A booklet prepared by the artist accompanies the exhibition at the daadgalerie. Films by Renée Green will also be shown on various dates as part of a public screening program.

Green’s writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships with language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time indicating other ways of being and becoming. Inevitable Distances presents recent productions in conversation with some of Green’s earliest and rarely exhibited works. Referencing the encounters made and the distances travelled in a life’s journey, the exhibition puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation. Through the juxtapositions of past and present, a paradox emerges: How do we bring back the dislocated and the dead, not in order to chase away the ghosts, but to welcome them and grant them “the right to a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice”?

Inevitable Distances is accompanied by a book of the same name, published jointly by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Hatje Cantz Verlag, and KW. Designed by Carolina Aboarrage, the publication contains contributions by Renée Green, Kathrin Bentele, Howie Chen, Emma Hedditch, Katherine McKittrick, Taylor Le Melle, Ima-Abasi Okon, and others, and is edited by Mason Leaver-Yap. The book will be available in early 2022. The publication is supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office.

The exhibition at the daadgalerie was conceived and curated by Melanie Roumiguière and Natalie Keppler. It is presented in collaboration with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

About Renée Green
Renée Green, born 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, lives and works in Somerville, MA and New York City. In 1993 she was a fellow of the Artists-in-Berlin Program. Green’s exhibitions, videos, and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennials, and festivals. Her books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010), and Ongoing Becomings (2009). Green is a professor at ACT, the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology, School of Architecture + Planning. In fall 2019, she was the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. At the invitation of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Renée Green will return to Berlin from October to December 2021.

DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program
The DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program is one of the most renowned residency programs for international artists and cultural practitioners in the fields of visual arts, film, literature, and music & sound. Each year, it awards residencies in Berlin to around twenty outstanding cultural producers. The residency enables the chosen fellows to focus on their creative thinking, actions, and research pursuits without being obliged to produce. Encounters with other artists and cultural producers stimulate transdisciplinary cooperation and initiate reciprocal learning processes.