Endless Dreams
Curator: Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Art at YBCA with Julio Cesar Morales, Adjunct Curator of Visual Art at YBCA
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) announces the
largest US presentation of time-based work in fifteen years by internationally renowned artist Renée
Green with the exhibition Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (Feb 20-Jun 20,
2010). The exhibition features two recent large-scale multilayered installation projects as well as
selected earlier works with a focus on film, video and sound as central transmitters for explorations in
the arts, humanities and sciences that intersect with the artist’s personal experiences and research.
The currently San Francisco-based artist has been creating works of art for more than 20 years that
critically assess the intersection of ideas, processes and creativities around a range of topics
including contemporary culture, history, fiction, transnational travel, dislocation, migration and
cosmopolitanism, as well as feminism and biography. Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams is
presented at YBCA as part of the Big Idea Bridging the Gap which features artists who are engaging
in international collaborations and immersive cross cultural investigations.
"Renée Green is a master at melding experience with research to create deeply moving works about
the real and imagined histories of individual lives in our mobile contemporary world. It is fitting that the
largest US presentation of her work takes place in San Francisco, a center for the intersection of
creativity and global media. Since YBCA’s primary mission is to present contemporary artists at the
forefront of their fields, we are pleased to dedicate our first floor exhibition spaces entirely to the work
of this influential artist," says YBCA Director of Visual Arts Betti-Sue Hertz. "While Green’s work is
internationally acclaimed, there has not been a major exhibition of her work in the US in 15 years, and
we look forward to introducing her to new audiences through the exhibition Renée Green: Endless
Dreams and Time-Based Streams.
Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams focuses on two large and complex installations, and
related new works, that together offer audiences a chance to view many of the major works produced
throughout her exceptional career. United Space of Conditioned Becoming (2007) explores passages
of time, various lacuna, locations and forms of living via a selection of films, videos, websites, and live
events produced over a 15-year span by Green’s (dream) production company Free Agent Media.
Visitors can perceptually travel to Berlin, Los Angeles, Kent State University, Kwangju, Barcelona,
Lisbon and Naples at different historical times dating from the 19th through the 21st centuries.
Featuring over 35 videos and several sound works, it includes Wavelinks (2002), seven videos shot in
New York, Vienna, Berlin, Los Angeles and Barcelona that include interviews with composers of
electronic music on topics such as activism and sound, laptop music and sound’s relationship to
pleasure; and Unité d’habitation (2006), which revisits the site of Green’s earlier work from 1993
about the famous apartment block in Firminy, France, designed by Le Corbusier. New features
include Animation Activation Space where audiences can listen to readings from Green’s manuscript
of writings titled Other Planes of There and an outdoor projection viewable in the evenings featuring a
trailer of F.A.M. videos.
In addition, the installation Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009), a commission from the
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, makes its US premier at YBCA. It includes banners with
"space poems," audio works, a feature length experimental film, three short films and printed
ephemera. Sensations and perceptions are intertwined with various histories, sites and people
surrounded by water. The installation unfolds from a script written by the artist containing a series of
long, contemplative letters exchanged between four female characters and their engagement with a
memoir by French novelist George Sand. It is saturated with images of the sea as well as the Bay
Area, Manhattan and Mallorca, locations where the fictional characters live.
Since 1991, Green has lived and worked in Austria, Portugal, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and the
U.S. and exhibited in the previously mentioned locations and also in Venezuela, Istanbul, South
Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland and the U.K. Her writings have been
included in many publications worldwide and have been translated into French, German, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Italian. Her first large-scale exhibition in the U.S. titled World Tour took place at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, over 15 years ago in 1993, which predates almost all the
work in Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams.
The catalogue for Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams includes interpretative texts, film scripts,
documentation and reproductions of works exhibited in San Francisco. Its aim is both to illuminate
and illustrate the depth and range of Renée Green’s work in the context of her most recent
productions, as well as to provide a reference to her work in film, video, and sound, including
bibliographic material referencing Green’s production from different countries.
This exhibition is organized by Betti-Sue Hertz, director of visual arts at YBCA.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a lecture by Renée Green takes place on Fri, Mar 5, 2010 from 6-8
pm in YBCA’s Screening Room and is free w/ gallery admission. Renée Green plans to speak about
the significant role time-based media has played in her multi-layered installations, especially in
relationship to her Free Agent Media (dream) production company’s wide-ranging activities. Co-
presented with the San Francisco Art Institute’s lecture series Spheres of Interest: Experiments in
Thinking and Action.
Other public programs including lectures/performances by filmmakers and
musicians and public readings from Green’s extensive writings with musical accompaniment are
organized by Julio César Morales, adjunct curator at YBCA.
Renée Green was born 1959, Cleveland, OH. Renée Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have been
seen throughout the world in museums, galleries, biennials and festivals. Ongoing Becomings, a
retrospective exhibition of Green’s oeuvre covering 20 years of her artistic output was organized in
2009 by the Musée cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. Recent one-person exhibitions
include Wavelinks, Neuberger Museum of Art (2006) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati
(2004), Unité d’habitation, Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris (2006), Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes
and Climates, Einstein Spaces, Berlin (2005), Relay, Kunstraum Innsbruck (2005), Index (From
Oblivion), Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2005), Elsewhere ? Here, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon
(2004), and Phases and Versions, at Portikus, Frankfurt (2002). Other venues that have exhibited her
work include Documenta XI, Kwangju Biennial, Whitney Biennial, Aperto, Centre Georges Pompidou,
MACBA (Barcelona), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), and UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Code:
Survey (2006), a major public work commissioned by the State of California can be found at the
Caltrans Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and also be accessed online. Some of her
publications include Ongoing Becomings (JRP, Zurich, 2009), Negotiations in the Contact Zone
(editor, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2003), Between and Including (Secession/Dumont, Vienna, Germany,
2001), and Shadows and Signals (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 2000). Green studied art at
Wesleyan University, with an intermediary year at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Green also
attended the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Green
is currently Dean of Graduate Studies and full professor at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Image: United Space of Conditioned
Press contact:
Kimberly Kuni Harding Phone: 415.321.1307, Email kharding@ybca.org
Opening Night Party: Fri, Feb 19, 2010, 8-11 pm
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, First Floor and Terrace Galleries
701 Mission St, San Francisco, CA
Gallery Hours: Thurs-Fri 2:00pm - 8:00pm; Sat 12:00 pm - 8:00 pm; Sunday 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm
and closed Mon-Weds except Free First Tuesday:12:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Admission $7 regular; $5 students, seniors & teachers//Free for YBCA Members//Free First Tuesday