Echo Chamber

Sharon Hayes & Brooke O’Harra
Performance
Commissioned and presented by Frieze and Artists Space NYC
May 9, 2025, 7pm and 9pm

In collaboration with Frieze, Artists Space presented Echo Chamber, a performance proposal by Sharon Hayes and Brooke O’Harra. Echo Chamber is a live performance made with and in response to cassette recordings—commercial, archival and homemade—from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The performance unfolds as a score for five performers and an installation of audio cassette players and microphones. Resisting the oversimplification of social discourse as an “echo chamber” reduced to ideology, the performance lingers with recordings of queer protest, LGBTQ oral histories, radio broadcasts and the artists’ personal audio collections from a 25-year span to find liberation in these echoes. Reverberating across political discourse from the McCarthy Era to the Trump Regime, Echo Chamber aims at the present moment and its confounding temporal orientations. Performers include Sharon Hayes, Greg Mehrten, Brooke O’Harra, Janice Owusu, and Pauli Pontrelli.