Ongoing Becomings. Retrospective 1989-2009

Reference monograph

This monograph provides the first overview of the variety and scope of the research carried out by Renée Green (*1959 in Cleveland, Ohio, lives and works in New York and San Francisco) over the past twenty years through mediums as varied as film, video, installation, sound-related works, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites, and ephemera.

Renée Green’s work is located both within the legacy of the most ambitious achievements of Conceptual and post-Minimal art, and within a post-colonial critique of culture. It often takes the form of complex, multi-layered archive-like installations that employ a vast array of sources, and point to a variety of issues, always involving the spectator as active participant through multiple points of access. The essays by Nora Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Quéloz, Gloria Sutton, Elvan Zabunyan, and the interview between Juliane Rebentisch and Renée Green not only give an historical overview of the artist’s work, but engage with issues central to her practice such as questions of genealogy and memory, archives and their reworkings, movements and displacements, site-specificity and location, positionalities and perceptions. They offer new insight into the artist’s specific use of images, sound and text, and her inscription in art history.

Published in collaboration with the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.