Rachel Yezbick

Performance sketches for MAHA Pavilion,
2020, courtesy of the artist

​"Yezbick explores body politics and contested sites of representation through an intimate collaborative performance with a Bangkok-based artist. For this work, the artists lend their bodies and sight to one another as proxies to explore each other’s respective cities, Bangkok and Los Angeles. They will engage with one another’s worlds via dialogue, distant tours, letters and personal memories of place.
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To contest highly mythologized and romanticized notions of these two cities, perpetuated by the film industry, the artists examine their own experiences to place, excavating the violence and vulnerability of the cities’ inhabitants that is often hidden from view. The work will layer the two sites on top of one another, uncovering the symbolic space between the locations.

The project occupies contested spaces in an effort to understand how we desire and yearn for places that have been fabricated from legacies of violence. By inviting comparisons between location and the artists themselves, this work asks us to reconsider the place and production of contested knowledge, as perceptions that permeate both place and person, the material and immaterial."

- Ryat Yezbick

"I am interested in using performance to non-normatively occupy normative social situations. I’ve never traced Wilde’s uselessness of art to the queer habit of the non-normative but, here in our conversation, I wonder if they might have a relationship.” – Sharon Hayes

In “Love Address”, Sharon publicly shares a love address to an unknown lover. The address is really to the Iraq war and the ways in which private and political selves get bound together. Sharon’s work addresses the authenticity of words when you are repeating the words of another.

“Love Address”, Sharon Hayes, performance, 2009