Artist Sharon Hayes presents Ricerche: four, an expansive and deeply moving two-channel video composed from interviews with LGBTQ+ elders across the United States. The final installment in her decade-long series exploring sexuality and gender in the US, the work draws inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), in which the filmmaker interviewed Italians about their shifting views on sex and sexuality. Adopting a similar structure, Hayes invites participants to reflect on their experiences of desire, identity, community, activism, and survival—modeling listening and dialogue as radical tools for intergenerational connection and collective understanding. As LGBTQ+ lives come under increasing political fire, Ricerche: four is an insistent reminder of the galvanizing force of shared testimony and the mobilizing potential of community.
Followed by a conversation with Sharon Hayes and an audience Q&A.
2024, USA
Format: Digital
In English
80 minutes followed by discussion
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sharon Hayes uses video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to examine the intersections of history, politics, and speech. Her work seeks to unravel reductive historical narratives and reactivate dormant pathways for imagining political resistance. She lingers in the grammars—linguistic, affective, and sonic—through which resistance takes form, aligning her practice with a heterogeneous field of voices and actions that challenge normative behaviors, unjust social contracts, and prescriptive notions of time. Hayes’s work is rooted in collaboration and sustained by a vital commitment to performance and the radical potential of non-normative public space. She sees public space as a site for unregulated, unpredictable encounters and collective possibility. Hayes has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at Neue Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Andrea Rosen Gallery (New York), Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid). Her work has also been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024); a Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2024); a United States Artists Fellowship (2021); a Pew Fellowship (2016); a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014); the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2013); an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She is professor and chair of Fine Arts at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops.