Salim Green explores themes of concealment, visibility, and opacity through a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, sculpture, video, performance, installation, sound, and writing. For Green, abstraction functions both as an aesthetic strategy and an attitude: a means of negotiating notions of legibility, authorship, and the plasticity of experience. A recurring point of reference in his work is “Dark Forest Theory”—a speculative framework proposing that extraterrestrial civilizations remain hidden to avoid detection and destruction. Adopting this theory as a lens for understanding relational dynamics and Black existence, Green’s work embodies acts of strategic withdrawal—resistant assertions of unknowability, interiority, and survival.

Salim Green has recently had a solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York and currently is the Sullivan Fellow in the arts at Wesleyan University.

Salim Green (b. 1996, Middletown, CT) earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 2020 and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2024. Green’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Room 3557, Los Angeles; Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Middletown; SculptureCenter, New York; Bellyman, Los Angeles; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Fábrica, Mexico City. His work is included in the collections of the Getty Research Institute, The Kinsey Collection and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Middletown, CT.

I watch
the smoke rushes like a mustang to the front of the stage briefly hems its lava with its fragile peacock
tail then tearing its shirt suddenly opens its chest and I watch it dissolve little by little into
British Isles into islets into shredded rocks in the limpid sea of the air
where prophetically bathe
my mug
my revolt
my name

Aimé Césaire. “Prophecy.” The Miraculous Arms, 1946.

In 1946, Martinican writer and later politician Aimé Césaire published his prominent collection of surrealist poems and plays titled “The Miraculous Arms.” Cherished for his literary verve and his political lucidity, Césaire coined the concept of Négritude, a movement in African and Caribbean cultures for art and poetry as a revolt for self-determination, solidarity, and cultural identity. His miraculous arms, or weapons, were words of protest and dreams, through which he reminded us that poetics and politics have the power to transform the world we live in and retrieve what our societies chose to forget.

Inspired by the writings of Césaire, the exhibition brings together a heterogeneous ensemble of paintings, drawings, photographs, films, sculptural installations and sound elements produced by seven international artists who explore the social, political, intellectual, and cultural complexity of our post-colonial realities and spaces. The presented works challenge our gaze on the fetishized and marginalized body, and tackle relationships of domination, power, and questions of race.

The artists here find resilience. Touching our vulnerability, both personal and collective, they reveal how urgent it is we pull together and the joyful moments of grace we can find there when we do. Since all that’s left is each other, the exhibition suggests that Césaire’s miraculous arms might be the ones that ultimately hold, protect and elevate us.

Imagine Salim Green’s artworks as a collection of nodes scattered across the United States quietly pinging each other. One lights up in New York; another responds in Los Angeles or Iowa. They signal affinities and connect at frequencies that don’t get picked up, or can’t totally be read, by those who might be listening in. One can imagine Green’s array of materials and locations plotted on a map or in a list, but it may be better to think of the project as a spread-out repository of interconnected information, always accessed incompletely and discreetly, but indicative of a larger consciousness or discourse in development below the radar.

Central to Green’s work is an engagement with “Dark Forest Theory,” a speculative idea that interplanetary civilizations hide from each other for self-preservation in order to prevent open conflict for resources. The theory assumes that extraterrestrials are out there, and tries to explain why they haven’t revealed themselves to Earth yet. Using this concept as a model for relational politics and for Black experience, Green’s work assumes the metaphorical position of hiding—from surveillance, from the anxieties of others, from attempted domination, from the state, from overreaching publicity and visibility. His art is a meta-commentary on working methods, but also takes those conditions and circumstances as its content, asking what artistic media, forms, images, and interventions should be used to talk about hiding out, or about partial disclosure.

Green’s project starts from the model of a book (a form that can compile, contain, sequence, and collage disparate elements) and expands to include sites, people, sculpture, painting, video, audio, business cards, banners, and websites, all linked. In collaboration with many other semi-anonymous contributors, he has primarily produced a wealth of literary and artistic material to consider in Dark Forest Theory, an artist book in an edition of 10, each encased in an aluminum box, that synthesizes imagery and texts. It includes emails with other artists about the implications of Dark Forest Theory, an essay entitled “The Loophole of Critique: Provisional Notes on Black Evasion,” among many other entries, photo collages, and writings. At SculptureCenter, the book is paired with a video work addressing family and violence, an outdoor installation of white pennant banners that serve both as a canopy and a means of visual interference within SculptureCenter’s courtyard, vinyl signage, and a soundscape composed with Teo Halm and in collaboration with a host of participants including friends, family, and the Newark Boys Chorus School.

The project also exists elsewhere, in combinations of works that sometimes include a copy of the publication and sometimes do not. Green’s selected locations necessitate different means of access, some by interfacing formally with higher education institutions (places of instruction feature somewhat prominently on Green’s map), others by visiting a laundromat or a rooftop farm, or incidentally finding a poster in a deli in Los Angeles. Moving across media and formats, Green makes artworks that find their homes in different contexts: in May, he installed and donated two of his paintings to a church in Waterloo, Iowa, and earlier in June he started advertising a Dark Forest Theory call-in number (718 717 2417) with business cards on car windows.

Green’s work operates on an assumption that an exhibition or a display of art cannot be read as a complete statement for a general audience. Instead, his project offers varied, hyper-contextual points of communication, asking viewers within and outside of art spaces to connect language to image, medium, and place, and to experience how “both hiding and evangelizing” (in the words of one anonymous contributor to the book) can produce public discourse. To pluck out or name fragments of the work is to give undue attention to single aspects of a big project—but the inevitability of a shifting focus, and what possibilities open up when focus shifts away, is part of the point.

The intention of this exhibition is to bring focus to the visual and cultural narratives that shape artists’ visual identities. Histories continuously breathe through the creative act, distorting the relationship of the present, past, and future. Artworks mark a convergence of these realities, existing not merely as physical presences but as living embodiments of elements of cultures. The artist, as a facilitator within the cultural archive, emphasizes their role in enriching and perpetuating the vitality of legacy in both themselves and their work, becoming references and proponents of living cultures as they manipulate light conversely. 

– Blessing Greer Mathurin