Renée Green

What is FAM? Before entering Renée Green’s exhibition “United Space of Conditioned Becoming2,” opposite the huge Volksbühne logo on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the viewer is confronted by these three letters in a trailer shown on a monitor and on black-and-red banners that fill the gallery’s street-facing windows. Twenty-seven thirty-two-by-forty-two-inch multicolored banners, stretched on nine horizontal wires, fill the gallery and form a “space poem.” Names printed on iridescent fabric (PAT HEARN, ALICE COLTRANE), slogans (NO NICHE IN THE MEGASTORE), and various other texts (A PARTICIPANT, HUGE HOLES) are combined with flashy patterns and image fragments. Lit by cherry-red, yellow, and green lights, the banners contrast sharply with the simple, functional wooden tables, each accompanied by a chair and bearing a DVD player or a monitor and headphones, situated beneath them.

The videos, audio recordings, films, and other paraphernalia present Green’s often-collaborative projects, developed since 1994 under the name of her imaginary multiauthorial production company, Free Agent Media (FAM). It takes time to sort through the complex material, which is presented in an almost provisional form; one could say an overload of material is becoming Green’s signature style. In a reformulation of her own earlier installations (considered in Germany an integral element of early-’90s Kontextkunst), from a Broodthaers-like vitrine to digital media archives, Green constructs visual systems that also visualize the impossibility of completion, a position well worth considering.