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Renée Green: Begin Again, Begin Again


Lecture

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

Renée Green will focus her talk on Begin Again, Begin Again, her recent exhibition for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, in which she considers the former house of architect R. M. Schindler (1887–1953) as matter in space conjoined with dreams and memories.

An excerpt of the film Begin Again, Begin Again, produced for the exhibition, will be shown. The film is a meditation on propulsive drives of live organisms, a probing passage through forms of inhabiting and occupying, as well as myriad sensations and perceptions that flow through the process of staying alive. Questions of configurations, architectures, and spaces emerge in relation to people and subjectivities that exist in the world: What is inherited and what is made, gained, lost, and transmuted through time, amid change and migrations, amid contestation, repetition, and difference? What efforts do live creatures exert to begin again?

The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Green and Carrie Lambert-Beatty, professor of visual and environmental studies and history of art and architecture at Harvard. The conversation will emphasize the role of writing, language, and poetry in Green’s practice, prompted by the recent publication of Green’s selected writings, Other Planes of There (Duke University Press, 2014).

This event will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, in Cambridge.

This lecture is part of the series What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century, by Ahmet Öğüt, Fernanda Fragateiro, Raqs Media Collective, and Renée Green, which will feature workshops and lectures throughout the month of April at the Harvard Art Museums. During each “intervention,” one artist or collective will interrogate specific cultural objects, both within the Harvard Art Museums collections and beyond, as sites of exchange, contestation, restitution, and critique. The series is bookended by two related exhibitions, The Way We Live Now: Modernist Ideologies at Work (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, February 5–April 5, 2015) and Jesse Aron Green: Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Harvard Art Museums, May 23–August 9, 2015). The series considers how artists today use a variety of research methodologies to reimagine the lasting and conflicted legacies of modernism in the contemporary moment.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.