Every Ocean Hughes in conversation with Catherine Wood

February 2022

Every Ocean Hughes was joined in conversation by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance), Tate, to discuss Hughes' wider practice in relation to her new film commission One Big Bag, which opened at Studio Voltaire in January 2022.

Centering on a millennial death doula and her ‘mobile corpse kit’, One Big Bag asks vital poetic, practical and political questions contributing to a necessary and growing debate around end of life practices. This is considered by Hughes from an explicitly queer perspective, exploring new references, vocabularies and aesthetics with which to reorient our approach to the notions of surviving and dying.

Read more about the commission here.

Catherine Wood is Senior Curator of International Art and Performance at Tate Modern. In 2012, she commissioned Hughes' performance I am a helicopter, camera, queen for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room.
Wood co-curated the Tate Modern exhibitions The World As a Stage (2007) and Pop Life (2010), and curated A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance (2012). She also co-directed the opening program for the Tate Tanks in 2012, titled, Art in Action. She has programmed numerous performances at Tate since 2003, including works by Mark Leckey, Joan Jonas, Guy de Cointet, Jiri Kovanda, and Sturtevant, and she initiated the online project, Performance Room in 2011. Wood is author of Yvonne Rainer: The Mind Is a Muscle (2007, Afterall/MIT press) and the publication, Performance in Contemporary Art (Tate Publishing, 2015). A regular contributor to Afterall, Artforum, and Mousse, she has also written numerous catalog essays, recently on Joachim Koester, Piotr Uklanski, and Sung Hwan Kim.
Every Ocean Hughes (FKA Emily Roysdon) (b. 1977), is an interdisciplinary artist based in Stockholm, Sweden.
The artist’s recent projects take the form of performance, photographic installations, printmaking, text, video, and curating. 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. Hughes has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2017); Secession, Vienna (2015); PARTICIPANT INC, New York (2015); Art in General, New York (2011); and the Berkeley Art Museum (2010). The artist has received commissions for new work from Tate Modern, London (2012, 2017), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2013–14); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2013–14); and the Kitchen, New York (2010).
A major exhibition of Hughes’ work is forthcoming at Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2022 and a new commission with the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023.