Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1970 in Baltimore, MD
Lives in Philadelphia, PA

Ricerche: four is the last in a decade-spanning series of works by Sharon Hayes focusing on sexuality and gender in the United States. In each video, the artist asks probing questions of an assembled collective: thirty-five students at an all-women’s college; children of queer and trans parents in Provincetown, MA; and players on two women’s tackle football teams. Here, three groups of LGBTQIA elders reflect on their lives, loves, and identities. Hayes adopted her interview style and the name of the series from the 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore (“Love Meetings”), in which the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini moved across postwar Italy interviewing Italians about sex and sexuality, examining the shifting values of the period. Now, with similar moralistic undercurrents running through American culture, Hayes’s video underscores the endurance of chosen community. Against the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic and the unfurling impact of social media, Hayes’s work asks what it means to gather now.