For Frieze London 2025, Dreamsong (AA3) presents sculptural game tables, ceramic wall reliefs, prints and a video installation by Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991, New York). Selected by renowned contemporary artist Camille Henrot as part of the fair’s artist-to-artist program, Harris-Babou shares a similarly interdisciplinary approach to sculpture, video and installation that explores the material culture of everyday objects and technological interfaces.
The Trump administration’s cancellation of public arts funding led Harris-Babou to think about the role of non-institutional public space in the creation and maintenance of civic fabrics. Her presentation for Frieze contemplates the value of cosmopolitanism in a time of global division and parochialism by exploring the culturally generative characteristics of big cities. Drawing from layered accumulations of collective mark-making shaped by communal presence, movement and touch, Harris-Babou’s new works emphasize play and take particular inspiration from ornamental subway tiling, wheat-paste and video advertising, and urban parks.
Focused on urban ‘third spaces’ – subways, parks, playgrounds – where personal and collective experience intersect, the artist explores how urban denizens commune, interact and cohabitate. Layering architectural history with evidence of its decay, she situates the subway as a kind of crossroads where commonality is forged amid difference. In a time of division and public disinvestment, the artist’s mosaic wall reliefs highlight the physical markers of coexistence, layering tesserae with ceramic impressions of both fingerprints and the ubiquitous swipe mark used to operate digital touchscreens. Sculptures reference the chess and backgammon tables offered for leisure in urban parks and allude to an inflection point in the urban landscape where people of different backgrounds, classes, and opinions are brought in contact with one another. The artist’s new video installation, shot in her hometown of New York; Dakar, the homeland of her father; and London, the site of the fair; is also tied to Audre Lorde’s Litany For Survival which is directed towards “those of us who live at the shoreline,” a place offered as a metaphor for liminality.
An assistant professor of art at Wesleyan, Harris-Babou’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe, including most recently in Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at The Art Institute of Chicago, which will travel to MACBA (2025) and the Barbican (2026). Recent solo exhibitions include Golden Thread at Crisp-Ellert Art Museum (Saint Augustine, FL) and Under My Feet at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In May 2023, Harris Babou's video installation Liquid Gold took over the screens of Times Square for the Midnight Moment program. Harris-Babou has also been included in the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and The Whitney Biennial (2019). Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Wellcome Collection (London), and Electronic Arts Intermix, among others. Her exhibitions have been widely reviewed, including in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, e-flux, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America. In 2024, the artist was the subject of Ilana Harris-Babou’s Guide to Health & Happiness, a short film produced by Art21.
