Lyle Ashton Harris
AKA Daddy
May 20 – June 24, 2018
Opening Reception and Performance, Sunday, May 20, 7-9pm

Lyle Ashton Harris returns to performance for the first time in over a decade with AKA Daddy, a new experimental multi-channel video installation that represents a highly personal engagement with loss through ritual expressions of public grief and mourning. Drawing upon motifs both archetypal and ethnographic, AKA Daddy explores the cathartic potential of communal reenactment for working through the complex, transferential affects evoked by the figure of the (absent) father, whether resulting from abandonment or death.

Weaving imagery from his childhood in the Bronx and family history in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, with documentation of his first-person participation in the traditional funeral rites of an Ashanti elder (the Ghanaian father of the artist’s former partner Prince) in Kumasi, Harris’s installation/performance presents a rich layering of visual and audio textures that enfolds archival photography, epistolary monologue, ritualistic gesture, and mnemonic evocation into a poetic amalgam, serving as witness to a journey through ambivalence towards the embrace of acceptance and release.

Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965, Bronx, New York) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photography and collage to installation and performance art. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on the contemporary social and cultural dynamic. His work is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has been exhibited internationally as well as in the Venice Biennale, the Bienal de São Paulo, and most recently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, presented on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Cinéma du Réel. He was the 2014 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 2016. Harris’s multimedia installation Once (Now) Again, was included in the 78th Whitney Biennial, his three-channel video work Ektachrome Archives (New York Mix), 2017, was acquired by the Whitney Museum, and an artist monograph titled Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs was published by Aperture in 2017. The artist currently lives and works in New York City and is an Associate Professor of Art at New York University. Lyle Ashton Harris is represented by Salon 94, New York.

PARTICIPANT INC's exhibitions are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Archiving and documentation projects are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
PARTICIPANT INC receives generous support from the Ames Family Foundation; Artists’ Legacy Foundation; Michael Asher Foundation; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; Marta Heflin Foundation; The Ruth Ivor Foundation; Lambent Foundation of Tides Foundation; Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; FRIENDS of PARTICIPANT INC; numerous individuals; and Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Dept. of Education.