In the Gallery

Audio Description: Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Love?

Listen to and watch an in-depth visual description of this artwork by Sharon Hayes

Press play and discover the story behind Sharon Hayes' installation Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Love?. Five loudspeakers stand facing five posters, reciting letters to unnamed lovers. The letters are highly emotional and intimate fraught with despair desire and longing. She speaks about her sense of helplessness during the unfolding invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the trauma and dislocation of living in a moment of war as a U.S. citizen and feeling dislocated from her daily life.

The letters do not specify the sexuality of the writer or their lover. For the performances, however, Hayes has said that she ‘butched myself up even more than usual because I didn’t want the love to be read as heteronormative.’

This audio description was written and recorded by Chris Timms, Retail Assistant at Tate. He shares his personal reflection on the artwork:

I was attracted to the ambiguity of the work and the questions being raised by Hayes. The works disobedience and contradictions invite our response to be active and discursive. I also found it interesting to think about the dialogue and tone being used and who it was meant for.

The title quotes a slogan from a protest placard from the Berkley student movement in 1967. This work is not a top-down authoritative act of transmitting a fixed meaning, but an open invitation to respond, in our own terms and in our own context, to the questions provoked by the work.’

This film has been created as part of the Terra Foundation For American Art Series: New Perspectives.

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