Sharon Hayes

I linger in the grammar—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which political resistance appears. I'm invested in specific intersections between history, politics, and speech, and root around in those intersections out of a desire to unspool reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. I make work in collective force and in resonance with the heterogeneous field of actions, voices, and practices that resist normative behaviors, complicit and unjust social agreements, and proscriptive temporalities to open up new ways of being together in the world. I began my work in the downtown dance, theater, and performance scene in New York City doing theatrically-based performance work. I maintain a deep commitment to performance and to collaboration. And I am devoted to the radical possibilities of non-normative occupation of public space and in holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters.

Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to develop new representational strategies that examine the current political moment. She views the present-day political condition as reaching backward and forward simultaneously—never wholly its own, but containing past moments and the speculations of multiple futures. Often addressing political events or movements from the 1960s through the 1990s, her focus on the near-past is influenced by urgent private and public concerns that inspire queer and feminist movements and writing.

Hayes’ video installation series Ricerche, the Italian word for "research,” draws its interview-centric structure from Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1963 film, Comizi d'Amore. The multi-work series explores perspectives on gender, sex, and sexuality, and the political and economic conditions that inform them. Ricerche: four, the final component of the series, is composed of three group interviews with queer and trans elders in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Dowelltown, TN. The work stages a contemporary inquiry into the "sexual problem" in the US, in which value-based policy and ideology cover up underlying economic and political vulnerabilities.

Hayes’ solo exhibition What do we want? was presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, Germany in 2022. Among the works featured was Ricerche: two (2020), a component of her larger series, comprised of video footage from Hayes’ interviews with 22 members of two American women’s tackle football teams. The work unearths a dialogue that explores dynamics of gender, sexuality, and community within and outside of professional athletic spaces. Hayes’ other solo exhibitions include An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose at Kristina Kite Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, in collaboration with Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, Germany (2021); and Echo at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2019). 

Hayes’ work has been shown in group exhibitions at institutions including the University of Applied Arts, Vienna; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Prospect 5, New Orleans, LA; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Los Angeles, CA.

Hayes has been awarded the US Artists Fellowship (2021), the Pew Fellowship (2016), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), as well as the Alpert Award in the Arts (2013). She received her M.F.A. from University of California, Los Angeles in 2003.