The artist’s video Reparation Hardware (2018) features her as the spokesperson for a fictional home furnishings brand, using authenticity and nostalgia to sell a new line of seemingly useless handmade objects. Throughout the film, Harris-Babou speaks calmly and confidently over a hopeful piano score while making not-so-subtle references to the history of enslavement, the Reconstruction era, and the possibility of reparations in the United States. “I do like to operate in this space where the videos at first look like something you’re really familiar with or comfortable watching,” says the artist. “Then I start to insert these uncomfortable things, these uncomfortable truths into a familiar form and see what happens when that friction comes up.” In works like Decision Fatigue (2020) or Cooking with the Erotic (2016), the artist juxtaposes the clean, cheerful, tasteful aesthetics and recognizable buzzwords of tutorial videos with off-kilter narration about power, breastfeeding, and the erotic, using strange concoctions like a Cheeto-dust exfoliant or a slurry of grains and blue paint in the works.

Alongside her video work, Harris-Babou constructs sculptures and installations that populate and expand on the multifaceted worlds she depicts. Her 2023 exhibition at Candice Madey gallery in New York, “Needy Machines,” combines video and sculpture to explore how our understanding of health is transformed by wellness culture, bureaucracy, and systemic inequalities in the United States. “A lot of these themes that I think about, like aspiration and how we try to seek control over our lives, they come so much to the forefront in this space of wellness and wellness culture,” says the artist. “Our bodies are obviously the site where so many of these things really play out.” Throughout the exhibition “smart mirrors,” a reflective surface combined with a digital display, cycle through images of bodily residue, CAPTCHA tests, and snippets of healthcare jargon alongside sculptures referencing tasteful bathroom tiles littered with organic debris. In her practice, Harris-Babou calls attention to how the media around us aims to produce specific identities, desires, and values all while questioning who is able to benefit from them.