Since the late 1980s, Renée Green’s multifaceted practice has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory, and circuits of cultural exchange. Her writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works continue to trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships to language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time, indicating other ways of being and becoming.

Green’s work came to prominence and circulated within the social and political flows between the world and the Americas, a concept that includes the United States, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Her practice continues to investigate the distribution and relay of art and ideas, and how these are braided with histories of migration and legacies of displacement, and the aesthetic forms and poetics that stem from these. In one of most comprehensive catalogues of her work since 2010, Inevitable Distances presents recent writing on Green’s work with some of Green’s early texts and influences. Indicating the encounters and distances travelled in a life’s journey, both this publication and the exhibition it catalogues puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation.

This book is co-published by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Berlin; Hatje Cantz; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Text by: Kathrin Bentele, Howie Chen, Renée Green, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Katherine McKittrick, Taylor Le Melle, Ima-Abasi Okon, Melanie Roumiguière
Designed by: Carolina Aboarrage