Sharon Hayes
1970–
In the video installation Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, we see Sharon Hayes’s face looking straight ahead, closely framed against a white backdrop. Hayes recites four of the audiotaped messages recorded by heiress Patty Hearst to her parents and broadcast in the media after her kidnapping in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing revolutionary group. On occasion Hayes’s memory falters, and off-screen participants correct or prompt her with lines from the original transcript before the monologue resumes. The tone of Hearst’s communiqués shifted over the months between the first and the last, as she began collaborating with the SLA, but Hayes’s voice remains affectless, imparting no position on what remains a contested episode in American history.
The SLA Screeds is one of a number of Hayes’s performances, videos, and video installations that take social or political documents from the past as their point of departure. She also has “respoken” addresses by Ronald Reagan and appeared with protest signs from various eras in locations around New York and other international centers. This citing of the past in the present not only draws renewed attention to old sources but also highlights the mechanisms of a text’s transmission, reception, and interpretation over time, and often testifies to stasis as much as change when her sources take on contemporary reverberations and relevance. Equally important, Hayes’s work underscores the performative dimension of public activism and political speech, demonstrating how much of what a message means is determined by how, when, and where it is conveyed.
Introduction
Sharon Hayes is an American multimedia artist. She came to prominence as an artist and an activist during the East Village scene in the early '90s. She primarily works with video, installation, and performance as her medium. Using multimedia, she "appropriates, rearranges, and remixes in order to revitalize spirits of dissent". Hayes's work addresses themes such as romantic love, activism, queer theory, and politics. Hayes works to develop "new representational strategies that examine and interrogate the present political movement, not as a moment without historical foundation but as one that reaches simultaneously backwards and forwards." She incorporates texts from found speeches, recordings, songs, letters, and her own writing into her practice that she describes as “a series of performatives rather than performance.”
Wikidata identifier
Q2277261
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 15, 2025.
Roles
Artist, installation artist, performance artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500294132
Names
Sharon Hayes
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 15, 2025.
