‘How can we build a structure to be alive inside?’ asks the American Stockholm-based artist Every Ocean Hughes in her text “Uncounted”.
For her first institutional solo exhibition in Scandinavia, we present a selection of Hughes’s most significant works from the past decade that address the struggle and ingenuity of queer life through the spaces and temporalities of an exhibition.
Every Ocean Hughes – Alive Time
1 Mar – 17 Apr
Alive Time is an exhibition in parts connecting the Moderna Museet to the choreography and performance center MDT and the historical Skeppsholmen Church/Eric Ericsonhallen. In “Alive Time”, Hughes revisits both works, considering the spaces in which queer life manifests within this new era of cultural politics and activism.
An exhibition in parts staging Hughes’s pioneering practice in performance, sculpture, installation, and video in various chapters and iterations. An exhibition in parts navigating queer life and death through a vocabulary of movement and trespass, care and kinship, celebration and survival. An exhibition that is discontinued, fragmented, always arriving.
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.
