In 1993, Green was invited to participate in “Project Unité,” a pioneering group exhibition featuring artists and architects organized by Yves Aupetitallot in Le Corbusier’s Projet Unité in Firminy, France, with the intention of “going beyond the confines of art and culture.” As her contribution, Green chose to inhabit an apartment in Le Corbusier’s semi-abandoned structure. The materials she produced and recorded during her stay were later translated into the first iteration of Secret, exhibited in James Meyer’s 1993 landmark group exhibition “What Happened to the Institutional Critique?” at American Fine Arts Co. in Soho, NY. Following the artist’s unique recursive methodology, the work was later expanded upon in 2006 and 2010.

Taking its title from a volume of Le Corbusier’s private drawing studies of female nudes, Secret simultaneously references Green’s own "secret" occupancy of a semi-deserted apartment in the architect's iconic housing block. Through a formal assembly of black-and-white photographs, a sculptural three-channel video device, and two multilingual soundtracks narrating Green’s observations, the artist investigates this "modern ruin" via the dual lenses of the document and lived memory as an active participant in a group exhibition and as a distanced observer enmeshed in both private and social sites. By juxtaposing her own diaristic observations with the socio-political realities of the building’s permanent residents—many of whom were immigrants—and of an early 1990s international art exhibition, Secret engages with the frictions of inhabitancy and travel, utopia and reality in a significant architectural site.

A pivotal work in Green’s oeuvre, Secret has been exhibited internationally, most recently as part of Green's survey exhibition Inevitable Distances at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2021) and Migros Museum, Zurich (2022), and it returns now to New York City, the city wherein Green’s Secret was first presented in the US.

The exhibition will also include a new two-dimensional artwork, produced specially for this iteration of Secret at 55 Walker.

From Green’s Secret script:

Character Profile: The character is visibly a female with brown skin and dreadlocks. She was born in the U.S. and speaks English as her nativetongue, but she studied French and in brief exchanges can seem to be from some French-speaking place. Where she might be from is very dependent upon the language she speaks. She’s been asked at various times and in various places whether she’s from Martinique, Puerto Rico, Guyana, Jamaica, some island near Venezuela, Paris, and New York. She’s been told by a Senegalese that she resembles a girl he knew in Senegal, and by a Mexican that she looks just like his cousin. She is from the metropolis, in her case New York.

The character has decided to do fieldwork on herself in this place which was unfamiliar to her but familiar to its remaining inhabitants. […] This fieldwork is on “the society (she) is condemned never to leave”: herself. She will execute a self-styled auto-ethnography. If others enter her narrative space, they too will be described.