Help Yourself

Ilana Harris-Babou is known for her videos that parody reality television tropes such as cooking and home-improvement shows, and star her and her mother, Sheila Harris. Across her videos and sculptures, she focuses on “self-improvement” and how aspirations for health and wellness become framed as moral decisions in contemporary culture. Especially in Harris-Babou’s most recent work, she shifts her frame to question how inequality in the US is presented as a failure of personal decision-making and commitments to wellness.

For the High Line, Harris-Babou shares four films created over the past five years. The earliest work in the exhibition is Cooking with the Erotic (2016; 12 min.), a cooking show where the artist and her mother use real food, art materials, and construction materials to offer tutorials for absurd concoctions. Finishing a Raw Basement (2017; 7 min) is Harris-Babou’s ode to home improvement, filled with buzzwords like “modern,” transitional,” and “classic” alongside Harris’s calls for reparations and not dismantling the father’s house with the father’s tools. In Fine Lines (2020: 10 min), Harris performs her beauty routine tutorial for meeting with a real estate developer. In the video, she reads letters she’s received from numerous developers trying to buy her Brooklyn home. For Leaf of Life (2022: 18 min.) Harris-Babou interviewed her sister about her experience working as a disillusioned health-care professional, as well as diet and wellness practices following the popular health guru, herbalist, and healer Dr. Sebi.

Organized by Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.