Renée Green, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams

The MIT List Visual Arts Center will host a screening and book signing reception to celebrate the publication of Renée Green’s latest book, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams.  Conceived for Green’s 2010 exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams considers the intricacy of the artist’s working methods, particularly in relation to writing. Over the past 20 years, through film, video, sound art, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites and ephemera, Green’s work has comprised complex, multilayered installations, employing a vast array of sources which always urge viewers to become active participants.

As writing and publishing are an essential part of Green’s practice, this recent publication comprises a convergence of theories and practices, dreams of the now, and perceptual shifts that span a vast range of time and space. Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams provides different ways to consider how words, images and sounds are animated and activated.  The book includes a comprehensive catalogue of Green’s time-based works and installations making this publication an essential complement to her retrospective catalogue Ongoing Becomings. Both publications will be available for purchase. 

In conjunction with the program Green’s feature film, Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009) will be screened;  the film’s  four fictitious characters sustain an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is weaved with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.

About the Artist

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.  Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals. She is currently an associate professor and acting director of MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).

Ongoing Becomings, a survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; in 2010, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. In 2008, Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur, a retrospective of Green’s films took place at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris.