Renée Green
Come Closer, 2008, by Renée Green
Under the project’s title Come Closer, three films will be shown simultaneously. The newest film is entitled Come Closer (2008) and is accompanied by two earlier films, Elsewhere? (2002) and Here until October 2004 (2004). Come Closer is envisioned as a prelude to a larger project entitled, Endless Dreams and Water Between.
Come Closer presents encounters, wishes, memories, and imaginings in a combination of footage from various materials and settings, including previously made films and videos set in Portugal and other locations, interspersed with different voices to create another place. All the components in some way relate to the dispersion of the Portuguese language, as well as of peoples, and the diasporic mixtures that have developed. The wish to be in contact with a brother and a friend who live in Brazil is transmuted into a gathering of different times and places creating a close encounter, at least for the duration of the film.
Both Here until October 2004 and Elsewhere? reflect, in different ways, the related theme of imagining what is possible, despite the conditions that can impede promise and fulfilment. All of the works were made in the present conditions of multiple wars, yet they also indicate that it is still possible not to become numbed to feeling, via compassion and efforts to change. No matter how bleak things appear this isn’t the sum of anyone’s existence.
RENEE GREEN was born in Cleveland (USA), in 1959. She lives and woks in San Francisco and New York. She is a fine artist, filmmaker and writer. Throughout her films, essays and other writings, installations and works that are related to the digital media, sound and architecture, Renée Green has carried out research work on the circuits of relationship and exchange throughout the times. She is interested in the changes and the omissions of public and private memories, as well as in what has been imagined and invented. She has also focused her work on what can be done and thought about the effects of a cross-cultural atmosphere in constant change.
She has worked for magazines, such as Texte zur Kunste, Spex, October, Transition, Frieze, Flash Art, among many others. Some of her books are:
Negotiations in the Contact Zone (Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2003), Between and Including (Secession, Vienna; Dumont, Germany, 2001), Shadows and Signals (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2000), Certain Miscellanies (DAAD, Berlin; De Appel, Amsterdam, 1996), After the Ten Thousound Things (Stroom, Haia, 1994), Camino Road (Free Agent Media/Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1994), World Tour (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993). She is currently a teacher at the SFAI – San Francisco Art Institute.
Her most recent solo exhibitions are:
Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2008), Wavelinks, Neuberger Museum of Art (2006) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2004), Unité d’habitación, Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris (2006), Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates, Einstein Spaces, Berlin (2005), Relay, Kunstraum Innsbruck (2005), Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2005), Elsewhere? Here, Filomena Soares Gallery, Lisbon (2004).