Admission starts at $5
Get ticketsMay 2, 2024, 7pm
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, May 2 at 7pm for a screening of two works by Thomas Allen Harris, curated by Daniella Brito.
Harris’ films are among a series of videotapes derived from the artist’s archive of his performance work from the 1990s. In Blue Baby, he embodies an infant who would have been aborted had their family known they would grow up to be queer. The recurrent performance intervention took place across public spaces in Los Angeles, ranging from shopping malls, to museums and cafés. In the second work, titled Heaven, Earth & Hell, Harris conjures the Trickster figure—an archetype found across Afro-diasporic and Indigenous folklore—to recount the story of his first queer love. In both works, Harris captures the gaze of the observer through disguise. As the artist adorns himself in striking body and face paint, he toys with notions of public spectacle, gesturing towards the racial, sexual, and gender subjectivities that fabricate cultural difference.
After the films, Harris will be in conversation with Brito as they ask: How does identity inform social otherization? And how can we understand the different implications of spectatorship between performance documentation and live performance?
Films
Blue Baby (1996/1997, 29 minutes)
Blue Baby is part of a series of performance-based videotapes that satirically examine identity and representation while investigating African diasporic cosmologies and ritual practices.
Heaven, Earth & Hell (1993, 25 minutes)
Reflecting upon the figure of the trickster in African and Native American culture while recounting the story of his first love, Harris creates a moving lament for the loss of innocence in a world without magic. The work interweaves critical texts by Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and James Baldwin.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.