Film Pop – PHI Foundation presents Problems of Leisure

Presented in partnership with the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art

Problems of Leisure brings together seven works by Ilana Harris-Babou, most of them screened for the first time in Canada. In the last decade, the artist has reinvested popular video formats produced in turns by media conglomerates, ad agencies or individuals acting as influencers – DIY, cooking and home-staging shows, promotional vignettes, wellness, makeup or skincare tutorials. Often binged mindlessly, these contents tend to be understood merely as conduits of leisure/pleasure to be endlessly reproduced, or as distractions from more serious matters. Recognizing their ubiquity in contemporary culture, the artist instead reframes them as nodes of power: highlighting the control they exert over the ways in which space, time and attention is organized in late-stage capitalism, but also assessing them as possible sites of a critical, often comic reimpowerment.