Archive and Dépaysement in the Art of Renée Green

Where the verb dépaysement evokes a mood of disorientation experienced during travel, it is argued that it is the primary medium through which Renée Green pursues a postconceptual art practice across installation, film, video, and writing. Showing how strategies of site specificity and institutional critique get imaginatively rerouted through Green’s diasporic journeys across Black Atlantic spaces, it is argued that rather than the influential “artist as ethnographer” model, gender-inflected considerations of the female flâneuse and epistolary modes of documentation give us a deeper understanding of the insights Green has won from her commitment to working with potentialities made available through her ongoing travels across “in-between” spaces.