Bodily Autonomy

In Under My Feet (2023), the titular piece of Ilana Harris-Babou’s show at Storefront for Art and Architecture, the artist films Central Brooklyn at hip height, documenting commercial storefronts, stoops, and sidewalks in the predominantly African American and Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods where she grew up. As wealthier, whiter areas have leveraged political connections to resist new housing, development has been shunted to politically marginalized areas like East Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Crown Heights, resulting in demographic and architectural change. The politics of land use can breed feelings of disenfranchisement. In the show’s other video, Myself the Way I Am (2023), the celebrated leader of a local Montessori school explains the importance of Black children directing their own education in a world that frequently disempowers them. A gentle earnestness has replaced the absurdist humor evident in Decision Fatigue (2020), Harris-Babou’s parody of Goop culture, and Leaf of Life (2022), her exploration of an herbalist healer. Where they showed how t…