ART CITIES: Stockholm-Every Ocean Hughes

Every Ocean Hughes, formerly known as Emily Roysdon, is an artist and writer living in Stockholm. Since 2013, she has been a professor of fine art at Konstfack, Sweden’s largest university of arts, crafts, and design. From 2013 to 2017, Hughes worked on “Uncounted”, at the core of the project is a 23-part text that engages a vocabulary of movement, margins, and trespass. It is about what is unseen in time, alive time, and the politics of transitions.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

Titled “Alive Time” the first museum survey exhibition in Europe features a selection of Every Ocean Hughes’ most significant works of the last decade that address the struggle and ingenuity of queer life. The exhibition takes place in various chapters and at different locations across Skeppsholmen island, including MDT and Eric Ericsonhallen/Skeppsholmskyrkan, thus aligning the format of the exhibition with Hughes’s approach to dispersal, fragmentation, and movement as distinctly queer strategies. Using Hughes’s text “Uncounted” as a guide, the exhibition considers “alive time,” “the politics of performance,” and “transitions.” In this, Hughes employs a vocabulary of movement and margins, care and kinship, and celebration and survival. The result is an exhibition that puts in motion queer perspectives on fundamental questions on life and death that we face as a society today. Many of Hughes’s early works, including the performance “A Gay Bar Called Everywhere (With Costumes and No Practice)” (2011/2022) and the text/performance “Uncounted” (2013-2017/2022), engage with what is “unseen in time,” as a deliberate move to prioritize the margin. In Alive Time, Hughes revisits both works, considering the spaces in which queer life manifests within this new era of cultural politics and activism. Building on her training as a death doula, a companion in the transition from life to death, Hughes has developed the idea of “queer death” in more recent works. In the performance Help the Dead (2019) and her film One Big Bag (2021), Hughes probes ideas on self-determination, survival, diverse kinship, accountability, and end-of-life aesthetics within the social and material reality of death. “One Big Bag” (2021) is a 40-minute single-channel video. The script is drawn from workshops, research and interviews Hughes conducted with several end-of-life doulas from different cultural backgrounds. The video uses the “mobile corpse kit – a bag filled with everyday objects doulas use to care for the newly dead – as both the visual structure and narrative driver of the video. With a matter-of-fact-demeanour and intense physicality, the performer guides the viewer into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care – practical, political and spiritual. The form of the video creates a tension between the subject matter of dying and the forceful aliveness of the performance itself. “Uncounted” (2013-2017/2022), Hughes’s text in 23 parts engages a vocabulary of movement and trespass, suggesting a way of existence “beyond the will to measure,” in the artist’s words. The project will manifest as an installation comprising text and sculptures in the foyer of Moderna Museet, alongside a multi-channel sound installation at various locations in the museum. The collaborative performance project “A Gay Bar Called Everywhere (With Costumes and No Practice)” (2011/2022) began with the idea that all of philosopher and writer Susan Sontag’s life and work took place in a gay bar. She never left the table. People come and go – styles, decades, regimes, and theories. This scene led the way to a loose formulation about performance, performativity, and theorising the struggle and ingenuity of queer life. Ten years after its initial staging at The Kitchen, New York, the gay bar is “re-spaced” in Stockholm to think through, to perform, the myriad changes, challenges, and glories that have shaped our queer lifetimes. Since “A Gay Bar Called Everywhere (with costumes and no practice)” was first performed in 2011, things have changed in countless material and manifest ways. Questions of gender and representation have exploded in popular culture. It’s a new era in activism and identity politics. How do we think and perform now? What is the gay bar still offering? Missing? Where did I go? In the performance “Help the Dead” (2019/2022), Hughes addresses self-determination, accountability and the fantasy of continuity. “Help the Dead” is part concert, part theatre, and draws inspiration from a series of death doula workshops Hughes has attended. In that time, the artist learned how to care for dead bodies and perform home funerals. Help the Dead considers “queer death,” mutual aid and the societal aspects of surviving and dying on planet Earth at this pivotal moment in time.

Photo: Every Ocean Hughes, Beyond the will to measure and what instruments have we, 2016 Installation view, Gwangju Biennial 2016, Photo: Doyun Kim

Info: Curators: Hendrik Folkerts and Catrin Lundqvist, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 1/3-17/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se