Ilana Harris-Babou: Selected Works

Screen still from “Decision Fatigue.”

Video Gallery

November 7 2025- January 25, 2026

​​Red Sourcebook, 2018, 4:12 minutes, color, stereo, HD video

Cooking With The Erotic, 2016, 11:37 minutes, color, stereo, 2-channel, HD video

Finishing The Basement, 2017, 6:41 minutes , color, stereo, HD video

Reparation Hardward, 2018, 4:05 minutes, color, stereo, HD video

Ilana Harris-Babou is a multimedia artist whose video works are an important component of a practice that includes sculpture and object making, performance, and installation. In her projects, Harris-Babou mines the aesthetics of YouTube tutorials, home improvement and cooking shows, and corporate ad campaigns to call attention to how personal and social identities are constructed—and co-opted—by dominant ideologies.

Harris-Babou unsettles the anodyne tone of these vehicles with wit and creative whimsy, utilizing and re-contextualizing mainstream media forms to make explicit the forces that are elided by slick production strategies: social stratification; legacies of structured oppression; and the homogenizing push of consumerism. Fit within a history of artists using satire and mimicry to critique media and communication platforms, Harris-Babou’s videos, many of which feature her own mother, also draw from her personal experience and lexicon of references to infuse her humor with deeply resonant meaning.

Harris-Babou has presented solo exhibitions of her work at Candice Madey Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY (2023); The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University (2023); Artspace New Haven (2022); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2021); Goucher College, Baltimore, MD (2021); Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2020); and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2017). In spring 2023, the artist installed Liquid Gold in Times Square for the Midnight Moment series. Harris-Babou has participated in major exhibitions including the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019), and group exhibitions at The Wellcome Collection, London, UK (2023); California College of the Arts Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA (2021); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2021); and Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2020). She lives and works in Brooklyn and Middletown, CT.

Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts