After Before by Sharon Hayes

Curated by Juli Carson

The UAG is proud to present – for the second time – the inaugural exhibition of our Critical Aesthetics Program: Sharon Hayes’ After Before. Originally commissioned in the Summer of 2004, After Before constructs a quasi-fictional, quasi-documentary multi-channel film, in which two figures interview people on the streets of New York City throughout the month of September 2004 – just two months before the 2004 US Presidential Elections – in an attempt to illuminate the state of the nation. Interrogating mythic and imagined constructions of “nation,” “people” and “choice, the interviewers also interrogate their own desire for knowledge and communication.  As an artwork, moreover, After Before engaged and disrupted the libidinal temporality intrinsic to that unique moment of all elections: a single day – much anticipated – that would shape the future of the nation. In this spirit, After Before performatively opened in October, before the Presidential election to re-elect President George W. Bush took place, and continued after the election, throughout the month of December. Re-staging After Before along the same time table today – on the eve of what activists and politicians predict will be “the most consequential presidential election in US history” – is to encounter what Craig Owens called the “allegorical impulse” in art.  In this mise-en-scène, two moments in time, 2004 / 2016, are staged and perceived neither as sequential nor as simultaneous.  Rather, these moments are imbricated in an uncanny temporal duet, one in which two U.S. elections are seen – one depicted, the other evoked – alternately as a moment of truth, a moment of possibility and an already determined fate – a non-moment.  In each instance, After Before continues to present a heterogeneous moment onto which we, as participants, may project contested ideas of what it means to be a U.S. citizen, in both historical and contemporary terms.