Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Time

Moderna Museet is proud to present the first survey exhibition in Europe by Stockholm-based artist and writer Every Ocean Hughes (b. 1977, US). Titled Alive Time, this presentation will feature a selection of the artist’s most significant works of the last decade that address the struggle and ingenuity of queer life. Alive Time takes place in various chapters and at different locations, including the performance and choreography center MDT and the Skeppsholmen Church, thus aligning the format of the exhibition with Hughes’s approach to dispersal, fragmentation, and movement as distinctly queer strategies.

Alive Time stages the full breadth of Hughes’s interdisciplinary practice, including performance, installation, sculpture, writing, and video. Using Hughes’s text Uncounted (2013-2017) as a guide, the exhibition considers the question “How can we build a structure to be alive inside?” 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/installation Uncounted (2013-text/installation2017/2022), 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.

Every Ocean Hughes’s exhibition Alive Time is curated by Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Contemporary Art), in collaboration with Catrin Lundqvist (Curator of Learning).