2017
Digital video
33 minutes and 14 seconds
Courtesy the artist, FAM, and Bortolami Gallery
“Blur happens when the level of precision goes up but you can no longer make distinctions.”
—Fred Moten in conversation with Arthur Jafa
Renee Green breaks down timelines of all magnitudes—modernist progress narratives, art historical canons and lifespans. In ED/HF, Green foregrounds the life and memory of her friend and collaborator, Harun Farocki. With the tenor of a contemporary installation, ED/HF functions as a memorial, of sorts, both lifting Farocki’s life out of distant memory into the present, and creating a dialogue between two friends. Green, who calls the piece “a film as a conversation,” says that she, “wanted it to be blurry.” The video oscillates between different voices and conceptual anchors—America and Germania, institutions and individuals, distance and intimacy. Green’s scholarly enterprises are united with creative expression as both artists examine the impact of migration and displacement on their respective practices. The blurring in Green’s video is captured best articulates the lack of precision that emerges when trying to piece together someone’s life. Reviewing materials and memories to build a portrait of a lost collaborator is always evolving and always incomplete.
ED/HF was streamed online as part of the exhibition from September 8-November 22, 2020.
Further reading:
Nicole Schweizer, Renée Green: ED/HF (2017)—Extraterritorial Durations/Harun Farocki, January 8, 2019
2017: The Year According to Renée Green, December 14, 2017
Related Events:
Renée Green: Artist Talk