This talk takes Philadelphia based artist Sharon Hayes' work Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Love? as a starting point to think about love, art, and politics. Through conversation chaired by So Mayer this event explores what does it mean to speak through love? What role does love play in artistic practice? And what can collective love do?
Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Love? is currently on display at Tate Modern in Room 1 of Performer and Participant.
Speaking Through Love: Sharon Hayes is part of How does art speak? A series of four conversations centered around North American artists exploring the many ways art communicates with us.
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. 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.
So Mayer is a writer, film curator, bookseller and organiser. Their most recent book is A Nazi Word for A Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), described by Eileen Myles as "a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon,” and they have recently co-edited Unreal Sex (Cipher, 2021, with Adam Zmith) and Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (Wayne State UP, 2022, with Corinn Columpar). @Such_Mayer
