MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by artist Sharon Hayes.

Hayes uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics, and speech, to unspool reductive historical narratives and reignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which political resistance appears.

These examinations are central to her work: from her earliest video installation, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003), in which she “re-speaks” each of the four audio tapes made by Patty Hearst and the SLA during Hearst’s kidnapping, to her most recent work, Ricerche: two (2019), an extended interview with 23 members of two women’s tackle football teams. Ricerche: two is one of five videos that examine how gender, sexuality, and sex are deployed in the current political crisis in the United States.

Hayes’s practice is in conversation and acts in collective force and 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. Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to performance and to collaboration and is 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. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She currently teaches in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Talks” is a series of lectures by artists, writers, and critics, presented by MFA Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts and held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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