Every Ocean Hughes: One Big Bag | Screening

Free entry, all are welcome! 

One Big Bag (2021) by Every Ocean Hughes is a 40 minute single channel video that uses a “mobile corpse kit”—a bag filled with everyday objects that death doulas have to care for the newly dead—as both the visual structure and narrative driver of the video. 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. The form of the video creates a tension between the subject matter of dying and the forceful liveness of the performance itself. 

The film that centres on a Millennial death doula asks vital practical, political and poetic questions contributing to a necessary and growing debate around end–of–life practices. With a matter–of–fact demeanour and intense physicality, the death doula’s monologue guides viewers into the largely uncharted waters of ‘corpse care’. She performs her work with everyday items manipulated to profound use – caring for the newly dead as well as loved ones left behind.

Hughes considers her subject from an explicitly queer perspective, exploring new references, vocabularies and aesthetics with which to reorient our approach to surviving and dying. Speaking to ritual, social and political questions about end of life practices, Hughes scrutinises the wider inequalities of the death industry including the economic burden of funerals, racism in medical care and funeral practices, and the bureaucratic barriers which effect queer communities and curtail individual agency in death.

Threaded with humour, grief, unknowing and a desire for justice, Hughes’ work encourages us to turn towards that which we strive so hard to avoid. 

Every Ocean Hughes, a.k.a. Emily Roysdon (born 1977), is a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Every’s recent projects take the form of performance, photographic installations, print making, text, video, and curating. EOH was editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR. 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), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2013–14); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2013–14); and the Kitchen, New York (2010). Group exhibitions include Hammer Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Museo Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016); 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014); Moderna Museet, Malmö, (2014); Future Generation Art Prize at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); the Whitney Biennial 2010; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), amongst many others. Every Ocean Hughes lives and works between Easton (US) and Stockholm