Lecture
Location
Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium
Milstein Hall
Contact
Department of Art
(607) 255-6730
Related Links
Abstract
In this talk, Ilana Harris-Babou will present works created over the past decade. Her practice is interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture, installation, and video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor to process painful realities. Her work mines the expectations of the American Dream — the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She explores the messy moments when individuals cannot fully conform to these systems when their bodies feel unwieldy or are forced to rest, break down, or quit altogether. She investigates how these frameworks might be misused in generative ways.
In her video work, Harris-Babou takes on roles such as celebrity chef, interior designer, or beauty vlogger and inhabits a constructed world where self-actualization is just one purchase away. Using the tropes of advertising and popular culture as a Trojan Horse, she aims to capture the viewer’s attention and distort the abject failures of material desire.
Recently, she has focused on community-based projects and public commissions. These projects stem from conversations about how communities find love, transcendence, imperfection, and self-determination amid the violent aesthetics of order. She seeks to highlight how people persist and find connection, even in the face of systems designed to reduce them to objects.
Biography
Ilana Harris-Babou
Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including recent exhibitions Needy Machines at Candice Madey and Under My Feet at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In May 2023, her work Liquid Gold took over the screens of Times Square for the Midnight Moment program. She has been included in the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and the Whitney Biennial (2019). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
