Lyle Ashton HarrisOnce (Now) Again

For the 40th Anniversary of France’s preeminent documentary film festival Cinéma du Réel, Lyle Ashton Harris will present an installation of The Ektachrome Archive alongside recent multi-channel video works, shown for the first time in France at the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris from March 9 – April 1, 2018.

For more than twenty-five years, Lyle Ashton Harris (born 1965, New York) has cultivated a diverse artistic practice ranging from photographic media, video, installation and performance. 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.

Lyle Ashton Harris’ Once (Now) Again, a site-specific multimedia installation features a three-channel video work comprised of projected images taken from Harris’ Ektachrome Archive (photographed 1986- 2000), as well as three video works using footage originally recorded on Hi-8 and MiniDV format in the 1990s. The resulting assemblage serves to both memorialize and evoke moments lived at the intersection of the personal and the political.

Bearing witness to a period of seismic shifts – the emergence of multiculturalism, the second wave of AIDS activism, and the interconnection of the contemporary art scene with LGBTQ and African diasporic communities -the Ektachrome Archive, an ongoing project, documents his friends, family, and lovers. By setting intimate moments alongside landmark events, the archive constructs collective and private narratives to comment on identity, desire, sexuality, and loss.

Installations of The Ektachrome Archive were exhibited in the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo, in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York, and in “Elements of Vogue: A case study in radical performance (http://ca2m.org/en/elements-of-vogue-radical-perfomance)” at Centro de Arte dos de Mayo Comunidad de Madrid, currently on exhibit through May 6, 2018.

In recognition that social upheaval produces a revolution in artistic forms, the festival’s accompanying events also feature screenings of works by Tacita Dean, a contemporary British artist working in film, as well as seminal works by Japanese documentarian Ogawa Shinsuke and the collective Ogawa Pro from the 1960s, complemented by a specially curated series of experimental film works focusing on 1968 as a generator of radical and innovative documentary cinema spanning five continents. Related festival programming also includes “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” featuring directors whose films span 1971-84, as well as a special tributes to French filmmaker Jean Roach, African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett, Brazilian filmmaker Andrea Tonacci, and Moroccan filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, among other festival documentary screenings.