American artist 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’ (meaning ‘research’) 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. 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, south of the river Clyde, opposite Glasgow Green. 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.

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.

Further Info

With thanks to Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.

Documents

E-flux Announcement – Sharon Hayes: ‘Ricerche’

Sharon Hayes interviewed by Adam Benmaklouf, The Skinny, October 2021

Commonwealth: Sharon Hayes Ricerche: two

Maddie Klett, ‘Sharon Hayes Turns the Camera on People Who Have Found Their People’, Frieze, May 2021

Project Details

‘Ricerche’ was presented at the former Adelphi Terrace Public School from 9 October – 7 November.

Read the Commentary by Nat Raha –

Listen to Nat Raha read ‘Love is the Message’ –

Project Location –

This month, we are delighted to announce the online screening of a film by Sharon Hayes, whose project we were due to present for this year’s Glasgow International, now postponed to 2021. The first in a suite of works, 'Ricerche: three' (2013), is available for viewing here from the 11th until 31st May.

Viewing Sharon Hayes’ 'Ricerche: three' in what is now the second month of confinement, is to experience the impossible, taboo even. Filmed in 2013 with students from Mount Holyoke women’s college in Massachusetts, 'Ricerche: three' shows us the prolonged and intimate sharing of public space with a group of other people. This simple representation of keeping company with others is all the more exuberant watched from the confines of our temporarily (and necessarily) abandoned public sphere.

Buzzing with dialogue, chatter and the joy of animated discourse 'Ricerche: three' offers liveness and interaction. Real physical embraces, gesticulations of emotion, expressions of disagreement, laughter and the pleasure of talk ring out, even during the film's imposed silences. Whilst we are unable to experience crowds and participate in the immediacy of debate, Hayes’ film is an invitation to gather together, to listen and to exchange values.

'Ricerche: three' is in fact the first in a long-term and currently ongoing investigative film series observing attitudes around sex, relationships, gender and nationhood in contemporary American society. The word ‘ricerche’ - Italian for research - is borrowed, along with Hayes’ frank methodological enquiry, from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film ‘Comizi d’amore’, a documentary investigation into the sexual attitudes of Italians during the 1960s.

Following Pasolini, the conversation staged and structured by Hayes draws its international participants, who identify across a wide gender spectrum, into dialogues centring around queer and feminist politics, self-definition, the importance of sexual and gender identity, and the influence of culture and religion on sexual, political and ideological freedoms. Through Hayes’ open questioning, a politics of the personal, social and communal emerges, giving voice to the schisms in operation within the private, self-selecting community of the university and public life beyond this space.

The film demonstrates the often difficult nature of expression, of forming an opinion, holding firm beliefs, and maintaining a political position. It reminds us that the kinds of closeness and proximity with others encouraged by university education breeds astute, reflective and engaged individuals which in turn develops networks of ideas; something that cannot be replicated so well through distanced learning.

To watch 'Ricerche: three' is to witness collective thinking in action: urgent, impassioned, messy talk articulated in real time. Spending time with these students as they establish antagonistic consensus and form a disparate collective identity is to participate in a shared experience that invokes the observer to take part, respond, and to shape change.

Project Details

‘Ricerche: three’ was available to watch online for a limited time in May 2020. We are grateful to Sharon Hayes and Tanya Leighton, Berlin for allowing us to share this film.

'Ricerche: three' (2013)
Single Channel HD Video (Colour, Sound)
38 minutes

Participants: Aderike Ajao, Zehra Ali Khan, Sara Amjad, Eirie Blair, Emma Boisselle, Eoin Bradley, Lisa Brea, Jasmine Brown, Octavia Cephas, Miran Chowdhury, Julia Corsetti, Jenny Daniels, Laura Donovan, Lyla Eaton, Caden Friedenbach, Tess Guilfoile, Keenan Hale, Liz Honorato, Pavel Lopez, Laakan McHardy, Alexandra Menter, Michelle Olguin, Tejumolu Onabajo, Jessica Ortiz, Jinyoung Park, Yesenia Parra, Anarkalee Perera, Shelley Picot, Karishma Reddy Khan, Naomi Rodri, Liz Sandman, Alyssa Simari, Poorna Swami, Suleidys Tellez, Caitlin Utter, Summer Yun Zhou

Production Credits:
Director: Brooke O’Harra
Director of Photography: Michelle Lawler
Cameras: Mike Crane, James Kienitz Wilkins, Lucretia Knapp, Nathan McGarigal Sound Recorder: EE Miller
Sound Mix: Josh Allen
Production Managers: Amber Bemak, Karishma Reddy Khan
Original Exhibition Design: Nanna Wülfing

Curated by Dr Dominic Paterson for the the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery, ‘A Synchronology’ is a new exhibition marking The Common Guild's 10th anniversary.

Taking its cue from the programme of exhibitions and projects we have realised since coming into being in 2007, the exhibition features several leading international artists and includes a diverse range of works that nonetheless share an interest in temporality: in marking time and in the presence of the past.

In our ten-year existence, The Common Guild has established itself as a leading force in contemporary visual arts in the UK. We curated Scotland’s participation in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, commissioning work by Corin Sworn, Hayley Tompkins and Duncan Campbell, who subsequently won the Turner Prize. The Common Guild has also worked closely with the University of Glasgow to present artist’s talks, symposia and other events, and ‘A Synchronology’ extends this collaboration.

The exhibition includes works by Robert Barry, Gerard Byrne, Phil Collins, Ruth Ewan, Sharon Hayes, Simon Starling and Corin Sworn and among others.

Further info

Supported by

Project Details

In collaboration with The Hunterian

'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You’ is a new exhibition by the American artist Sharon Hayes. Hayes’ work often explores the role of the individual voice within a wider political history, and this exhibition draws on queer and feminist archives in the US and the UK to focus on gay liberation, women’s liberation and the political groups that preceded lesbian and transgender liberation between 1955-77. The exhibition examines the ways in which political discourse is formed and political identities constructed through individual acts of writing and reading.

Hayes' research included the magazines, journals and newsletters produced by lesbian liberation groups, primarily ‘The Ladder’ (published by the American organisation Daughters of Bilitis between 1955-1972), and ‘Arena Three’ (published by the British organisation Minorities Research Group between 1963-1972). She also draws on newsletters published by groups who existed for a much shorter period, from a few months to a few years. The exhibition includes material from a number of archives around the world, including Glasgow Women’s Library, which has a significant collection of lesbian and feminist publications.

Hayes’ work engages the intimacies of political collectives - both at times when movements are ascendant and at those times when they fail. Working from the content and form of archival materials, particularly the vast field of newsletters, 'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You’ restages the affective forms of organisation she encountered in the archives. Organisation of labour, of community, of communication and public relations are of specific interest, as are the conflicts, both personal and political, that surface frequently in these newsletter communications over the specific limits of gender, the regulation of gender expression and the fierce racisms that many lesbian, queer and trans people of colour encountered inside various of these political movements.

Further Info

Additional Links

Adam Benmakhlouf reviews 'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You', The Skinny, November 2016

Project Details

'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You’ was co-commissioned by The Common Guild and Studio Voltaire, London.

The commission was supported by Cockayne – Grants for the arts and The London Community Foundation, Charlotte Ford, Haro & Bilge Cumbusyan and Valeria & Gregorio Napoleone.

With thanks to Glasgow Women's Library.

Read the Commentary by Laura Guy –

Room for Reading features publications about and selected by exhibiting artists in our programme.  

Throughout 2016, our Room for Reading selections feature publications chosen and inspired by Ulla von Brandenburg, Akram Zaatari, Simon Starling and Sharon Hayes, artists we are working with on current and upcoming projects.

In advance of Ulla von Brandenburg’s performance ‘Sink Down Mountain, Rise Up Valley’ at Langside Halls on the 30th and 31st of January, we have selected three publications on the artist’s work.

‘Whose beginning is not, nor end cannot be’ was published on the occasion of Von Brandenburg’s exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2008. The publication features essays by Declan Long and Beatrix Ruf, as well as an interview between the artist and Rachel Thomas.

‘Innen ist nicht Außen (Inside is not Outside)’ was published in 2013 to accompany an exhibition of the same name at Vienna Secession. It features texts by Nina Möntmann, András Pálffy, Annette Südbeck and René Zechlin.

‘Ulla Von Brandenburg. Formerly Elentiere’ (2008) was published following the exhibition, ‘Where a red net lies over the green’ at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2008, and features texts by Nina Möntmann and Vanessa Joan Müller.

Von Brandenburg selects ‘The Saint-Simoniens: Reason, Imagination and Utopia’ by Antoine Picon (2002), in which Picon discusses Saint-Simonianism, an influential utopian movement in 19th Century France, paying special attention to Saint-Simonian ideas about architecture and public space.

Von Brandenburg’s second selection Music, Musicians and the Saint-Simonians’ (1986) by Ralph P. Locke outlines Saint-Simonian approaches to music as an ideological tool.

Read ‘The Saint-Simoniens: Reason, Imagination and Utopia’ here.

As Akram Zaatari, ‘The End of Time’ opens at 21 Woodlands Terrace, the artist has made a selection of books to accompany the exhibition.

The first is 'Akram Zaatari: A Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi’ published by Sternberg Press, 2012. During a residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Zaatari attempted to write, improvise, and deliver a conversation with an imagined Israeli filmmaker, giving him the name Avi Mograbi. Zataari used this fictional character as a device to revisit photographs he made during the Israel occupation of his hometown in 1982, imagining what could have been experienced by an Israeli filmmaker in this time.

'Akram Zaatari: Time Capsule, Kassel 24/25.05.2012' is a postscript to the exhibition 'This Day at Ten' at MAGASIN - Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, 2013. Inspired by an act of conservation that the founder of the National Museum in Beirut undertook on the eve of the civil war in 1975–6, ‘Time Capsule, Kassel’ is, in the artist's words, a statement about speculation, photography, time and withdrawal.

'Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer talks to Akram Zaatari’ (2014) is an in-depth interview between the artist and critic Quinn Latimer. In the interview Zaatari describes his work: “as with most of my work, it is made for time; it is both a testimony of where I come from and a mark I care to leave for the future—again as thought, not as data or records. Let’s call it alternative writing that uses the form of letters.”

Read Quinn Latimer on Akram Zaatari in Artforum here.
Watch a short film by Akram Zaatari about ‘Time Capsule, Kassel’ here.

Zaatari also selects 'Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography' by Karl Bassil, Zeina Maasri, and Akram Zaatari (2002) which accompanied the eponymous exhibition curated by Walid Raad and Zaatari from the Arab Image Foundation. Featuring photographs taken between the 1920s and the 1970s, in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, it raises questions about portraiture, performance, photography and identity in the Arab world.

'EARTH of ENDLESS SECRETS' by Karl Bassil and Akram Zaatari (2009) examines Zaatari’s ongoing research project, unearthing and examining a wide range of documents that testify to the current cultural and political conditions of Lebanon.

Akram Zaatari’s 'All Is Well' (2014), published on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada, addresses the complex history of the civil conflict in Lebanon. The publication explores the precarious status of archives in times of war, as well as their discursive limits as narrators of Lebanon’s history.

Read an interview with Zaatari on ‘Mapping Sitting’ published by MoMA here.
Watch a selection of excerpts from Zaatari’s films on Video Data Bank here.
Watch Zaatari speak about photography, memory and here.

In the final instalment of Akram Zaatari’s Room for Reading selections, the artist selects authors and critical works that describe aspects of Arab life.

'Sitt Marie-Rose (A Novel)' by Etel Adnan (1982) is set before and during the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War, and based on the life of Marie Rose Boulos who was executed by a Christian militia during the long conflict.

'The Bedouins and The Desert: Aspects of Nomadic Life in the Arab East' by Jibrail S. Jabbur (1995) is an extensively illustrated account of traditional bedouin life in the Arab east which recounts the history of the enigmatic Slayb tribe.

'From Palestine to Israel: A photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950' by Ariella Azoulay, a photo book in which Azoulay reconstructs the processes by which the Palestinian majority in Mandatory Palestine became a minority in Israel.

Sonallah Ibrahim’s 'Zaat'(2001) tells the story of an Egyptian woman – the eponymous Zaat – during the regimes of three Egyptian presidents: Abdel Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak.

'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression' by Jacques Derrida (1995), a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving and an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology, including the e-mail.  

Read ‘Sitt Marie Rose’ here.  
Read an excerpt from 'The Bedouins and The Desert: Aspects of Nomadic Life in the Arab East' here.
Listen to a talk by Ariella Aisha Azoulay ‘On Photography and Potential History’ here.

Read ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’ here.

To coincide with Simon Starling’s exhibition ‘At Twilight’, the artist has selected the following books for this month’s Room for Reading.

'A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska' (1970) by the modernist poet and writer Ezra Pound was first published in 1916. The 1970 edition brings together Pound’s original text with later writing on Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French sculptor with whom Pound had a friendship before the former was killed in World War One. Pound was a huge champion of Gaudier’s work and raised the profile of the artist both during his life and after his death.

'W.B. Yeats & the Theatre of Desolate Reality' (1965) by David R. Clark illustrates Yeats’ development as a dramatist, through close examination of four of the modernist poet, playwright and writer’s plays.  

Starling has chosen two books on Noh Theatre, a Japanese form of dance-drama that has been performed since the 14th Century. 'Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays' (1983) by Nobuko Tsukui, and 'The Noh Theatre of Japan' (1959) by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. Starling has also selected 'A Guide to Kyogen' (1968) by Don Kenny, a book designed as a basic guide for the viewer of a Kyogen performance containing synopses of all the plays in the present repertoire of the Kyogen practice. 

'Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats & Modernism' (1988) by James Longenbach details the period between 1913-16 during which W.B Yeats developed his autobiographies and Noh-style plays with the help of Ezra Pound.  

Finally, Starling selects 'Four Plays for Dancers' (1921) by W.B.Yeats, which includes 'At the Hawks Well' a play by that was written and performed 100 years ago and is at the heart of Simon Starling and Graham Eatough’s ‘At Twilight: A play for two actors, three musicians, one dancer, eight masks (and a donkey costume)’. 

Read ‘A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska' here and read more about Yeats and Brzeska here.
Read ‘The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats’ (1963) published by MacMillan here.

Sharon Hayes

As Sharon Hayes’ exhibition 'In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You’ opens to the public, we have selected three publications that focus on the artist’s earlier work.

Sharon Hayes, 'There's So Much I Want To Say To You' (2012) was published in conjunction with Hayes eponymous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 which brought together works, all of which articulate forms of what Hayes calls “speech acts”.

Hayes’ ‘Ricerche: three’ (2013) was commissioned and presented as part of ‘Il Palazzo Enciclopedico’ (The Encyclopedic Palace) curated by Massimiliano Gioni on the occasion of the exhibition at the 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The catalogue is included here.

Our final recommendation is the catalogue accompanying the 2010 Whitney Biennial, titled ‘2010’, curated by Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, in which Hayes’ work ‘Parole’ (2010) was included.

Read more about ‘There’s So Much I Want To Say To You’ here.
Read Massimiliano Gioni’s curatorial text for ‘Il Palazzo Enciclopedico’ here.
Read more about ‘Parole’ and ‘Ricerche: three’ in an essay by Julia Bryan-Wilson for Afterall Journal here.

Sharon Hayes recommends 'Queer Art: A Freak Theory' (2012) by Renate Lorenz. Lorenz’s book develops a queer theory of visual art based on extensive readings of art works and theoretical debates combining queer theory with post-colonial theory, and (dis-)ability studies, proposing the three terms: “radical drag”, “transtemporal drag”, and “abstract drag”.

Hayes also selects 'History Is Ours' (2009) by Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes, published by Kunst Museum St. Gallen and Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg to accompany a collaborative exhibition of the same name. The publication features transcripts and documentation of the artists’ work as well as conversations with Yvonne Rainer and Wu Tsang.

Lastly, 'After Before - in the near future’ (2008) by Sharon Hayes which documents Hayes’ project ‘After Before’, a multi-channel video installation developed during a studio residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2004.

Read an excerpt from ‘Queer Art: A Freak Theory’ here.
Read ‘History Is Ours’ here.
Read ‘After Before – in the near future’ here.

Details

Room for Reading is a space to engage with research related to our programme as recommended by the artists and collaborators we work with at The Common Guild.

Books are suggested in conjunction with our exhibitions and projects.