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  • The Space of an Encounter: An Interview with Sharon Hayes
  • Gwyneth Shanks (bio) and Sharon Hayes (bio)

One of Philadelphia-based artist Sharon Hayes’s earliest works is The Lesbian from 1997. The solo performance is based on a three-and-a-half-month research project she conducted earlier that same year, in which she drove some 10,000 miles cross-country. Along the way, she [End Page E-73] interviewed lesbians, documented—through photos and video footage—what she describes as “evidence of lesbian communities,” and performed in lesbian living rooms. In the performance, however, Hayes is the only figure visible onstage; she plays a tour guide, leading the audience through an exhibition in a museum dedicated to the “natural history” of the lesbian. The spatialized exhibition form, though (i.e., walking from gallery to gallery), was translated into the temporal divisions of theatrical scenes.

Video documentation of her journey accompanied Hayes onstage, but mirroring her solo live performance, she is the only person visible in the footage. While the performance and research project seemingly revolves around an excavation of identity or community that might lend itself to the presencing of many lesbians, Hayes refuses such facile representations. Rather, The Lesbian locates its political and relational force precisely in the interplay between presence (Hayes’s own body and voice) and absence (no one else is visible). Through these performance choices, Hayes questions the “essentialism of identity politics” through what might be described as tactics of temporal and embodied refusal. The audience, in other words, is forced to “construct meaning from absence rather than presence.”1

I begin this introduction to my interview with Hayes by describing The Lesbian for a few reasons. It illustrates her investment in and history with theatrically based performance traditions, even as her subsequent work has expanded, now also encompassing video, audio recording, multichannel installations, and text-based pieces. The Lesbian indexes her continued investment in a deeply rigorous research-based and often archival artistic practice. But it also centers what have become primary threads in Hayes’s work: namely, the ways queer desire, intimacy, and attachments can be cited/sited and how we contend with thick or dense time, as what is present or absent in a given encounter grapples for authorial claim over our understanding of a past, present, or future. This June, Hayes and I connected over Zoom to discuss her work and the ways in which she makes sense of space, time, and the re-circulation, or distribution, of ideas and histories in her artistic practice.

Gwyneth Shanks (GS):

I want to start with a question focused on installations, as our interview will appear in Theatre Journal’s special issue focused on installation. How do you conceptualize your work and its relationship to space?

Sharon Hayes (SH):

I have never found the term installation art terribly useful, because I don’t think of installation itself as a medium that creates the pressures that, say, video, performance, sculpture, or painting do. I’ve never used the term because I think that all work—video, performance, sculpture, and painting, for instance—moves through various conditions of installation in its path to meet an audience. So, I appreciate that you started with space because that’s really the question. How is space connected to place, institution, framework, discourse, and/or belonging?

For me, foundationally, space, which is also always place, is a container—and I mean that architecturally, institutionally, psychically, socially, and culturally—for the work. Space, or place, is the container that holds an encounter between the work and the audience. What that means is that I am accountable for and to the entirety of that encounter and holding it in architectural, psychic, social, cultural, and institutional space. Now, of course, it’s not the only encounter an audience has with the work, but it is a significant one. [End Page E-74]

As somebody who came into exhibition practice via theatrically based performance practice, space was an immediate site of both familiarity and unfamiliarity, confusion and possibility. The thing that was animating and vexing were the points of difference between theatre and exhibition, which had to do with...

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