MOCA Artist Film Series: Sharon Hayes
Ricerche: four, 2024, 120 min.

MOCA Artist Film Series is presented by The Edward F. Limato Foundation.

Ricerche: four, 2024 is composed of interviews with three groups of LGBTQIA elders, filmed in Philadelphia, PA, Dowelltown, TN, and in Los Angeles, CA. Through joyful, illuminating, and deeply moving conversations, participants reflect on their relationships to community, family, activism, sex, sexuality, and the shifting political landscape. While not all participants identify as elders, each speaks from deep, lived experience that shapes their understanding of the social, political, and economic promises and possibilities — as well as the obstacles — facing them and their communities. These conversations make an inspired proposition for the importance of intergenerational collaboration, dialogue and care. Ricerche: four is one part of a 4-part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1964 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the US.

Sharon Hayes will be present for a post-screening conversation with participants from the film.

Sharon Hayes is an artist who works with video, performance, sound, and public sculpture to reveal the intersections of history, politics, and speech. Her work challenges reductive historical narratives and reactivates overlooked pathways for developing alternative understandings of today’s political landscape. Hayes’ practice engages in dialogue and collective resonance with a diverse range of actions, voices, and practices that resist normative behaviors, unjust social contracts, and rigid timelines—opening up new possibilities for how we live and relate to one another in the world.

Her work sustains a distinct and vital commitment to perfor­mance and to collaboration and is devoted to the radical possibilities of non-normative occupation of public space and in holding public space as a site for unpredictable and unregulated encounters. Hayes has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2014), the Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012), and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2012). Her work has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including a Pew Fellowship (2016), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2013), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship (2007). She currently teaches in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

MOCA Artist Film Series is organized by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.