Salim Green describes his interdisciplinary practice as a process of “defining things by their edges.” His practice often adapts speculative models, such as Dark Forest Theory and related ideas, as frameworks to metabolize lived experience. With their resistant assertions of unknowability and interiority, Green’s works refuse the pull of settled meanings or clearly mapped identifications, deploying concealment, opacity, and illegibility as strategies drawn from Black experience.

Sugarshack, Green’s first solo exhibition in Europe, draws its title from an expression used by the artist’s father to describe abandoned or deteriorating buildings in his hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. A major Midwestern manufacturing and industrial hub, Waterloo became a destination for Black Americans leaving the segregated South during the Great Migration, many of them recruited by the railroad to break labor strikes. New arrivals were given train boxcars as temporary housing neighboring the train tracks on the east side of town before building their homes in the same area–the only part of the city open to them at the time under Waterloo’s restrictive housing covenants–many of which have now been abandoned.

Compelled by his father’s conception of the “sugarshack” as a social, financial, and physical barometer of a community’s vitality, the exhibition at Société centers the fellowship hall of Payne Memorial AME, a historically Black church on Waterloo’s east side. A secondary space of the church, the fellowship hall hosts community gatherings and public programs and, when not in use, holds on to whatever’s left from them. The hall becomes a kind of model for thinking about space more broadly, how a room registers its own use, or the absence of it, as a measure of what surrounds it.

Here, the installation at Société mirrors a piece of Waterloo’s social condition and expands it, offering access to a new audience, and positioning it as a setting for a new series of drawings, sculptures, and video works, one of which features Green’s reoccurring CGI surrogate “Shifty,” a fluid character that the artist has used in past works and lectures. In Sugarshack, Shifty appears as a race-shifting Iowa farmer–a figure who delivers a monologue about the railroad’s relationship to Waterloo, performs a Luther Vandross song as a perverse love letter to the east side, and sporadically haunts the video.

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, New York; Société, Berlin; Josh Lilley, London; 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 between Los Angeles, CA and Middletown, CT, where he is currently the Sullivan Fellow in Art at Wesleyan University. Sugarshack is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe, which will be followed by a residency at Callie’s, Berlin, in Fall 2026.