SCREENING

The PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Film POP, presents Ilana Harris-Babou: Problems of Leisure.

This program brings together seven works by Ilana Harris-Babou, many of which will be shown for the first time in Canada. Over the past decade, the artist has reinvested popular video formats produced in turns by media conglomerates, ad agencies, or individuals acting as influencers—such as DIY, cooking and home-staging shows, promotional vignettes, wellness, makeup or skincare tutorials. Often binged mindlessly, these contents tend to be understood merely as conduits for leisure/pleasure to be endlessly reproduced, or as distractions from more serious matters. Recognizing their ubiquity in contemporary culture, the artist instead reframes them as nodes of power: highlighting the control they exert over the ways in which space, time, and attention is organized in late-stage capitalism, but also assessing them as possible sites of a critical, often humorous, reempowerment.

Curator: Daniel Fiset

Ilana Harris-Babou, Cooking with the Erotic, 2016. 11 min 37 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Decision Fatigue, 2020. 8 min 32 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Leaf of Life, 2022. 17 min 41 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Finishing a Raw Basement, 2017. 6 min 41 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Reparation Hardware, 2018. 4 min 5 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Red Sourcebook, 2018. 4 min 12 s
Ilana Harris-Babou, Human Design, 2019. 5 min 40 s

Videos will be presented in their original language in English.