Sharon Hayes

Sharon Hayes

b. 1970, Baltimore
lives in Philadelphia

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, In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You, 2016. 5-channel HD video, colour, sound, and installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin