Open Lecture and Artist Talk with Sharon Hayes at Konstfack 10 April

Sharon Hayes’ solo exhibition at Moderna Museet opens on 12 April. Wednesday 10 April at 5.30 pm she gives an open lecture and artist talk in Mandelgren at Konstfack. Welcome!

Sharon Hayes has had solo exhibitions and performances around the world. Highlights include a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010), special jury prize at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), amongst many others.

Sharon Hayes investigates how political intention and longing can manifest concretely, in a movement from the individual or the protective community of groups to larger forums. The video installation “In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You” (2016) enacts a pivotal work in the feminist and queer grass roots movement of the 1950s-1970s, of putting words to experiences and dreams that could not previously be voiced. This piece belongs to the Moderna Museet collection and forms the starting point for this exhibition, which is Hayes’ first in Stockholm.

At Moderna Museet on the 12th at 5 pm, Hayes will be in conversation with Konstfack fine art professor Every Ocean Hughes, f.k.a Emily Roysdon, long time friends and colleagues.

https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/sharon-hayes/

Hayes practices a unique blend of performance and social engagement, often taking her performances outside of the gallery and into the street. She is known for reciting, or, to use the term she prefers, "re-speaking" political speeches from the 1960s and 1970s, such as taped messages from Patty Hearst recorded soon after she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Hayes repeated Hearst's words verbatim in her four-part video Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20, & 29 (2002). In a 2004 performance that was ten hours long, titled My Fellow Americans, 1981–1988, Hayes respoke each of Ronald Reagan's 36 addresses to the nation. For In the Near Future, a piece she did initially did in New York in 2005, and then adapted for several other locations, including Brussels, London, Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, before developing it into an installation, Hayes held up different protest signs in locations all over the different cities. The signs often dated from earlier eras, such as "Ratify E.R.A. Now!," which gave a sense of temporal dislocation to the work. Such disorienting gestures are Hayes's specialty: By plucking a slogan or speech from an earlier time, and reinserting it into the present moment, she keeps history alive.

Born in Baltimore in 1970, Sharon Hayes studied anthropology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and performance art at Trinity/LaMama Performing Arts Program in New York in the early 1990s. Although she later pursued her studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, from 1999 to 2000, and received an MFA in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California Los Angeles in 2003, her early education had a pivotal influence on her later work. Though she was initially interested in journalism or anthropology as career possibilities, she was troubled by journalism's potentially reductive approach to complex issues, and the way that anthropology imposed a hierarchy between ethnographers and their subjects. A dance class opened her eyes to a new and completely different possibility: performance. "I realized that performance allowed me to entertain all the curiosities of journalism and anthropology without the limitations that I experienced in the practice of either," Hayes said in an interview. (bio from guggenheim.org:)

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