Sharon Hayes
b. 1970, Baltimore
Lives in Philadelphia
Venue
3162 Dauphine Street
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–4 PM
Neighborhood
Ninth Ward/Lower Ninth Ward/Bywater (Upper Ninth)
About the project
If we had had, 2021
7-channel HD color video, with sound; 60 min.
Courtesy the artist
If we had had extends Sharon Hayes’s ongoing interest in how the limitations and possibilities of the past continue to shape everyday life and public spaces in New Orleans.
Engaging New Orleans, geographically, socio-politically, and historically, as a platform, If we had had creates and documents twenty-two queer folx traveling different pathways through the city. Walking, on pedicabs, or taking public transportation, these travelers transport an open set of questions around desire, queerness, civic and public space, and the power and fragility of self-determination.
Filling the atmosphere of the piece is an extended karaoke scene featuring seven queer and trans performers who cycle through three sets. Filmed at Kajun’s Pub, a popular karaoke bar in New Orleans, the performers selected their own songs, many of which they have performed previously. These performances amplify the vibrant space of queer karaoke, in which singers delightfully and joyfully enter one another’s songs, vocally channeling individual and collective pleasures as they step into, critique, and talk backward and forward to queer life and living.
Neither documentary nor fiction, these scenes exist as propositions that ask how queerness or queer embodiments shape spatial spheres of possibility and constraint, visibility and invisibility, activity and action.
ABout the artist
Sharon Hayes’s work, primarily video installation and performance, explores the recursive nature of the past in our present. Recognizing that the present is not a discrete moment, she invokes historical perspectives on our current political climate. Her work explores the near-past in order to re-ignite dormant pathways through which new understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. Much of her work has interrogated the grammar—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which political resistance moves to concrete form. Hayes’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Her work was shown at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and other venues around the world. Among her many accolades and awards, Hayes has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2007). She studied anthropology at Bowdoin College and later received an MFA in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (2003). She is a professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Sharon Hayes, If we had had, 2021. 7-channel HD color video, with sound, 60 minutes. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. 3162 Dauphine Street, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photos: Jose Cotto