Sharon Hayes: Ricerche

Sharon Hayes’ new project with The Common Guild is a suite of three films, shown together for the first time. It is the continuation of Hayes’ on-going Ricerche project, including a new commission. Ricerche is comprised of several video works that use the 1964 film Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings) by Italian director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, as a guidepost and framework for an examination of gender, sexuality and contemporary collective identifications.

Ricerche constitutes an inquiry into the relations between sex, sexuality, gender and politics in the United States today, with nonetheless striking resonance with contemporary discourse across societies elsewhere. It continues Hayes investigation of the act of public speech, and its intersections with history, politics, activism, queer theory, love and sexuality, through both the collective and the individual voice.

Filmed by Hayes at different times since 2013, including during 2020’s critical election year in the US, the works feature a range of individuals, from students at an all-women’s college in Massachusetts, to children of queer or gender non-conforming parents, and members of two women’s tackle football teams. Each film is presented as “ricerche” or research.

The most recent, Ricerche: two, was filmed in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, just before the onset of the pandemic. It was commissioned by The Common Guild. The extended interview asks the players what they like about the sport, whether they feel different on and off the field and how playing football relates to other aspects of their lives. Ricerche: two was also co-commissioned by the exhibition project Commonwealth and three collaborating presenters, Beta-Local, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and Philadelphia Contemporary. 

This new work will be presented alongside the two existing works in the series; the single-channel video Ricerche: three (2013), and a diptych, Ricerche: one (2019). 

Ricerche is presented in the former Adelphi Terrace Public School, at 5 Florence Street, Glasgow, G5 0YX. Originally opened in 1894 following the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, which made schooling free and compulsory for five-to-thirteen-year-olds, the building was used as a site of education for children and young adults until 2010.

With thanks to our venue partner Urban Office and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.

Artist biography
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) lives and works in Philadelphia, USA. Hayes is one of the most influential politically and socially committed artists working in the United States. She has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Hayes’ work is part of the public collections of Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Warsaw; among many others. Hayes’ 5-channel video installation In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You (2016) was co-commissioned by The Common Guild and Studio Voltaire, London.

Sharon Hayes holds the position of Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.