Angry and Tender: Sharon Hayes and Brooke O’Harra’s ‘Echo Chamber’
Queer politics past and present resound across live performers and audio cassettes in this Frieze Week work at Artists Space
Queer politics past and present resound across live performers and audio cassettes in this Frieze Week work at Artists Space
Artist Sharon Hayes and theatre director Brooke O’Harra ‘unspool genealogies of queer life’ in Echo Chamber, a live performance for Frieze New York 2025 at the iconic Tribeca venue Artists Space.
Echo Chamber unfolds as a score for five performers and an installation of audio cassette players and microphones. Hayes and O’Harra draw from their archive of cassette recordings, both commercial and personal, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, including radio broadcasts and Hayes’s 1987 conversations with lesbians across the US. This audio material is, as O’Harra describes it, not ‘precious’ but ‘precarious’: the recordings ‘don’t only have to be studied, analyzed, or listened to again, but reinvented’.
Reverberating across recorded and live voices, past and present, Echo Chamber considers the current political moment and its confounding temporal orientations; ‘what it means to be going “backwards”, particularly for queer folk’. The artists are ‘invested in how queer history and queer politics moves across generations’, say the pair. Hayes and O’Harra made Echo Chamber with the belief that ‘making the future is about imagining from these materials’.
Echo Chamber was performed by Sharon Hayes, Greg Mehrten, Brooke O’Harra, Janice Owusu and Pauli Pontrelli.
About Sharon Hayes
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. These examinations are central to her work: from her earliest video installation in 2003, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29, in which she re-speaks of each of the four audio tapes made by Patty Hearst and the SLA during her kidnapping, to her most recent work Ricerche: four, a two-channel video installation composed of footage from three group interviews with queer and trans elders in Philadelphia, Dowelltown, Tennessee and Los Angeles.
About Brooke O’Harra
Brooke O’Harra is a professional theatre director and artist. Current projects include an upcoming tour a large-scale performance project titled Be Holding with poet Ross Gay, composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the new ensemble Yarn/Wire (David Gaines, Yolanda Wisher and Ross Gay perform). Brooke is also the co-creator of a collaborative performance with artist Sharon Hayes called Time Passes. Time Passes is an eight-hour performance that uses the audiobook of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. This show has had two iterations and will continue to be performed for a decade.
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Frieze New York is presented with Global Lead Partner Deutsche Bank, reflecting a shared commitment to artistic excellence for over 20 years.
