This screening is part of our Producers’ Forum program. Join us for a screening and discussion with Sharon Hayes featuring excerpts of recent work.

About the Film: 

Ricerche, (Italian for “research.”) is a five-part video series where Sharon Hayes interviews groups of people in outdoor spaces, exploring people’s views of sex and sexuality. In the first Ricerche video, Hayes interviewed a group of students at an all-women’s college, and the second gathered together children of queer and gender-nonconforming parents. Hayes creates intimate, detailed, and at times heated examinations of collective identification.

Hayes has turned the camera on people who have found their people – a condition central to organized resistance and a theme throughout the ‘Ricerche’ series. (source) 

What emerges in all three of Hayes’s Ricerche works is that collective identity is never singular or unified, but rather shifts within larger political contexts. Ricerche: two was filmed just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic, and before the current global uprisings against systemic racism. Hayes’s work-in-progress poses urgent questions about how we might talk and move with fearlessness and pleasure as we address the future together. (source) 

We will be screening the following: 

Ricerche: two
two-channel video installation
38m
2020

Ricerche: two is an interview with 23 members of two women’s tackle football teams in the Dallas/Ft.Worth, TX area: the Arlington Impact and the Dallas Elite Mustangs.

Since the inception of tackle football in the late 19th century, organized women’s tackle football has appeared in fits and starts and at varying scales and with limited success. At present there are over 4,000 people playing professional women’s tackle football on 80+ teams across 8 leagues. Despite the professional aim of the pursuit, players must play a players fee of roughly $1-3K per year and participate in fundraising events and campaigns for the team. Players have some other form of employment, many holding 2 or more jobs during the season in order to pay for team fees, equipment and travel.

In the interview, the players address football, passion, family, sexuality, gender and the financial and social obstacles to playing this sport. They move against, around and in resistance to bounded and regulated ideas of gender and demonstrate gender, and, particularly the category “woman”, to be an infinite, powerful and ever-changing container.

Ricerche: three
single channel video installation
36m
2013

Ricerche: three is an expanded (intentionally exaggerated in terms of scale) interview with 35 students at an all-women’s college in western Massachusetts. The interview unfolds on camera in such a way that you’re not entirely sure how many people are being interviewed as interviewees slowly add in as the camera, following the interviewer, shifts across the group left to right.

Using the container of an all-women’s college (with only 47 such institutions remaining in the US), Ricerche: three attempts to address the contradiction that such gender-segregated institutions are “behind” and “ahead” of the rest of society.

Many US-born women stopped being as interested in attending all-women’s colleges a few decade ago but these all-women’s schools continue to provoke rumors and fantasies in the public imagination as people identify them as hot-beds of lesbian activity/sex/sexuality. More recently, these colleges have had to address the need to accommodate students who decide (after enrollment) to change their gender from female to male. Thus the population attending the school exists on a much wider gender spectrum than the description “all-women’s college” can hold.

This video series is widely acclaimed in both the art and film world, covered in publications such as E-flux, Frieze, Art Forum, the Tate Papers and more. It has been shown at museums and art institutions across the country like Museum of Modern Art in New York City, ICA Boston, and more. Don’t miss out on this special presentation. 

About the Artist: 

Sharon Hayes is an artist who uses video, performance, sound and public sculpture to expose specific intersections between history, politics and speech, to unspool reductive historical narratives and to re-ignite dormant pathways through which counter-understandings of the contemporary political condition can be formed. In her work, she lingers in the grammars–linguistic, affective and sonic–through which political resistance appears. 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. She currently teaches in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.