At Frieze London 2025, Dreamsong presents new mosaic wall reliefs, sculpture and a video installation by Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991, Brooklyn, NY). Selected by renowned contemporary artist Camille Henrot as part of the fair’s Artist-to-Artist program, Harris-Babou shares a similarly interdisciplinary engagement with the material culture of everyday objects and technological interfaces.

Harris-Babou’s presentation for Frieze looks to the generative friction produced by urban democratic spaces such as subways, parades, beaches and parks. Adopting Audre Lorde’s poem, A Litany for Survival, as a starting point, the artist catalogues how cities are imprinted with their occupants’ indelible voices and desires. Lorde’s poem laments the generational inheritances of material and cultural marginalization, discussing the curtailed choices facing ‘those of us/who live at the shoreline/standing upon the constant edge of decision.’ As the daughter of parents who came to Lorde’s Harlem neighborhood from Senegal and the Jim Crow south, Harris-Babou adopts the poet’s admonition to ‘speak/remembering/we were never meant to survive’ in work that celebrates solidarity by seeking out layered accumulations of collective presence, voice and engagement within the urban landscape.