Screening: One Big Bag (2021) by Every Ocean Hughes

Friday, February 24, 7–8 PM

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202

Free and open to all

In anticipation of Every Ocean Hughes’s lecture on Monday, February 27, join us for a special screening of One Big Bag (2021), a forty-minute video that uses a mobile corpse kit—a bag filled with everyday objects that death doulas carry to care for the newly dead. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality, the performer guides the viewer into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care—practical, political, and spiritual. 

Every Ocean Hughes, a.k.a. Emily Roysdon, is a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Every’s recent projects take the form of performance, photographic installations, printmaking, text, video, and curating. EOH was editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR. Her many collaborations include music with The Knife, Colin Self, and JD Samson & MEN; costume design for choreographers Levi Gonzalez, Vanessa Anspaugh, Faye Driscoll, and the band Le Tigre.

EOH has had solo exhibitions with Studio Voltaire, London (2022); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2017); Secession, Vienna (2015); PARTICIPANT INC., New York (2015); Art in General, New York (2011); and the Berkeley Art Museum (2010). EOH has received commissions for new work from Tate Modern, London (2012, 2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013–2014); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2013–2014); and the Kitchen, New York (2010).

Every’s work has been featured in the 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); the Biennale of Sydney (2014); Future Generation Art Prize at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Whitney Biennial 2010, New York; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2010); Greater NY, MoMA/PS1 (2010); and The Generational, New Museum, New York (2009) and included in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); Moderna Museet, Malmö (2014); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011); and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), amongst many others.

A fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2019–2020, Every is the 2021–2023 Sachs Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. EOH’s much-awaited solo exhibition Every Ocean Hugues: The Alive Side is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from January 14 to April 2, 2023.

This screening is presented in collaboration with Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.