Vista de sala de la exposición. Sharon Hayes. Habla, 2012

Interview with Sharon Hayes

Habla

sábado 01 septiembre 2012
6:21
Politics
Language
Body
Sound
History
Action
Criticism

On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in Europe, the American artist Sharon Hayes (Baltimore, 1970) spoke with the Radio del Museo Reina Sofía about some of the issues that she addresses in her work.

The exhibition, which is entitled Habla and can be visited until 24 September 2012, brings together a group of works that highlight the artist’s ongoing investment in the intersections between history, politics and language (or speech). In the interview, Hayes explains her interest in the importance of the relationship between the voice and the body in her art, which has resulted, to a large extent, in her work – whether installation or video – having a visible and audible performative component, as can be seen in the audio fragments from two of the pieces in the exhibition: Parole (2010) and I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I'm Not Free (2008).

The conceptual turn in Hayes’ work between the body of the speaker and the body of the listener also took shape in the performance piece that the artist presented outside the Museo Reina Sofía, in which she recited a text in Spanish by heart written expressly for the occasion by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg. Hayes talks about her role as a medium in this activity in which she spoke a language that she does not know, an experience that also leads her to discuss the translation of her works and the attendant layers of meaning and resignification.

Production

María Andueza

Locution

Anna Hastings

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Interview with Sharon Hayes

Habla

Sharon Hayes. Habla. From May 30 to September 24, 2012

- Audio: Fragment of Parole

Sharon Hayes: I’ve been invested in the last fifteen years in exploring in my work these very precise intersections between History, politics and speech.

Part of what I’ve been interested in, in my work, is the way in which a speech is also something which, because it happens through a body, because it is a person who speaks, it has a very interesting connection to the moment in which it’s spoken; and in that way, it traces out of connection to the form of performance.

- Audio: Fragment of Parole

In Madrid, in particular, it’s very interesting for me to come with a body of work that is almost all in English, and then to kind of confront in each, and for each, individual piece the question of translation. Because I find translation, actually, to be as meaningful as the kind of original content of the work itself. That translation isn’t just the practical way to have something understood, but it creates a whole other layer of meaning.

- Audio: Fragment of Estimada Señores

Each of the works in this exhibition function differently, I think, and some of the works, I think Parole and also Yard Sign, which are maybe the biggest pieces in the show, in a certain sense they do occupy the space in that they’re specifically meant to sit inside and to kind of demonstrate the ways in which they sit inside of the museum space.

I don’t think of the form of occupying the museum as a position of being contrary to the kind of idealized possibilities that always exist in museums, which is the possibility that one can imagine something beyond what is here. And I think in that sense my work is trying to dialogue with that kind of idealized way in which the museum allows for, a kind of, at its best, semi-autonomous examination of possibilities that aren’t or can’t be evident out in the world.

It’s something that in a way has always been a part of my work but that I think I’m more deeply exploring now. What is the material form that speech arrives in our ears? And how is sound, in particular the sound of a voice… How does that sort of shape and impact the ways in which our listening is even possible?

A lot of my attention had been, in a certain way previous to Parole, on the role of the speaker. And it was a very interesting and really deeply important shift to turn to the role on the body of the listener. And to try to connect more deeply, to interrogate what I do think of us as the politics, the conditions that make things possible… make it possible for us to listen, what listening means, even.

- Audio: Fragment of I March In The Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I'm Not Free.