Ilana Harris-Babou: Selected Works

Nov. 7, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026 | Video Gallery

​​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 a Raw Basement, 2017, 6:41 minutes , color, stereo, HD video

Reparation Hardware, 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

Screen still from “Decision Fatigue.”