There’s talk and there’s speech and artist Sharon Hayes has a lot to say to us about the force of language. Opening yesterday at the Whitney, her third-floor installation is an architectural environment designed in collaboration with Andrea Geyer that suggests a political rally, a state fair and a trade show all rolled into one. Within this environment, which has platforms, a video theater, and “soap boxes” where visitors can perch, Hayes explores connections between politics, history, and desire through various forms of address.

The exhibition includes work in different media from Xeroxed handbills to photography, yard signs, video, and projections that articulate forms of what Hayes calls “speech acts”—forms of speech that function not only as communication but also as action.

The works in the exhibition, which include a group of existing ones with several newly commissioned pieces, weave together narratives from the past and present, with personal declarations of desire, longing, and love. The range of media deployed is in itself a document of the communications revolution that began with mimeographed handbills during the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. In “I Saved Her a Bullet,” the artist uses an overhead projector to display a grainy TV screen shot of Anita Bryant (a second-rate entertainer who became famous as an anti-gay political campaigner in the 1970s) getting a pie in the face. At the other end of the spectrum, six “Voice Portraits” (above right) feature moving images projected on what appear to be clear Lucite pages suspended from the ceiling.

In “Yard (Sign),” dozens of found and fabricated signs introduce a quiet, but aggressive form of speech about political, religious, and personal subjects. Installed on a platform to the side, the signs constitute a raucous babble that is both rooted in the past (“Free Huey”) and of the eternal (“Enter”).

Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say To You, as the exhibition is titled, conveys the artist’s point of view on subjects of personal significance to her, such as free speech, discrimination, gay rights, and the AIDS crisis. She asks: How do we understand the speech of protest? What is the relationship between words, the person speaking them, and the time and place of the action? What is an act of public resistance in the present political moment? In replying to these questions, Hayes engages the collaboration of numerous participants from various realms of society to create a multi-layered perspective on what it is to be an activist.

Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say To You continues through September 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 945 Madison Avenue at 75^th Street, NY, NY. Above left: Sharon Hayes at the media preview on Wednesday; right: Voice Portrait, video. Photos: Peggy Roalf.