Sharon Hayes

In the Near Future
stages a set of anachronistic and speculative
actions in an ongoing investigation into the figure of the protester. Once a day, from November 1 to November 9th, 2005, Sharon Hayes stood on the street with a sign at nine different locations throughout New York City. Audience was invited to come and document these actions.

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Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29

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On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by a radical political organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). From February to April, 1974, the SLA and Patty Hearst made four audio tapes in which she addresses her parents on the subject of her kidnapping, the SLA's ransom (that the Hearst family feed all the poor people in California) and the family and the FBI's actions during the ordeal. In the last tape, Hearst renames herself Tania and announces that she is joining the SLA in their struggle. From June 2001 to January 2002, Sharon Hayes performed a respeaking of each of the four audio tapes. In each instance, Hayes partially memorized the transcript of the audio tape and spoke the text in front of an audience to whom she gave a transcript of the text. She asked them to correct her when she was wrong and to feed her a line when she needed it.

Born in 1970, Sharon Hayes gained her MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA’s Department of Art (2003). Part anthropological fieldworker, part dramaturge, New York based Sharon Hayes’ artistic role is to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Her video, performance and installation projects have engaged individual and group perceptions of political events and ideologies, employing conceptual and methodological approaches borrowed from artistic and academic practices such as theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism. Hayes’ work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, Dance Theater Workshop, and at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She has also shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and Zagreb. Hayes was a 1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow; received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999); and she was a participant in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program (1999-2000).