Born in 1970, Baltimore. Lives in New York.
In her artistic and activist practice, Sharon Hayes uses performance and the documents of performance in a way that performing a piece is consciously constructing the document of it. Based on her study of the history of political actions in a specific context, the artist stages performances as protests, speeches or demonstrations in a public space, and presents them in different frameworks (film, theatre, anthropology, linguistics, journalism and everyday conversation).
I Didn't Know I Loved You (2009) is a site-specific collaborative performance and installation that examines the conditions under which collective political and social identifications are constructed. The work is driven by the artist's continuous mappings of public speech acts, and explores how the speech act makes meaning in love and politics. The piece examines expressions of gender and political desires and their relations towards the emancipatory possibilities of public speech in the social context of enforced heteronormativity and political repression. It is realised in collaboration with participants from İstanbul who engage in a range of public speech acts that present an acute mix of ideas about the 'global and local public sphere'. The artist is particularly interested in ways that the global imagery of texts, words, phrases, and images, none of which, according to her words 'flow without material economic and ideological attachments, and all of which flow in and out of various local contexts' constantly get involved in a multitude of political struggles.
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