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  • LAH Guggenheim Mapplethorpe Installation 2019-20

    Left: AKA Daddy, 2018; Right: The Watering Hole [Panels II and VII], 1996
    In “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” (Part 2), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2019-20

 

Lyle Ashton Harris returned to performance in 2018 for the first time in over a decade with AKA Daddy, presented at Participant Inc. (New York), which included a new experimental multi-channel video installation representing a highly personal engagement with loss through ritual expressions of public grief and mourning.
 
Drawing upon motifs both archetypal and ethnographic, AKA Daddy explores the cathartic potential of communal reenactment for working through the complex, transferential affects evoked by the figure of the (absent) father, whether resulting from abandonment or death.
 
Weaving imagery from his childhood in the Bronx and family history in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, with documentation of his first-person participation in the traditional funeral rites of an Ashanti elder in Kumasi, Ghana (the father of the artist’s former partner, Prince), Harris’s performance and installation presents a rich layering of visual and audio textures that enfolds archival photography, epistolary monologue, ritualistic gesture, and mnemonic evocation into a poetic amalgam, serving as witness to a journey through ambivalence towards the embrace of acceptance and release.

 

After its premiere at Participant Inc., the large mixed media wall collage titled AKA Daddy which was a central element of the initial installation/performance was included by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in its 2019-20 exhibition “Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now” (Part 2), which also featured Harris’s Americas (Triptych), 1987-88, Ecstasy #2, 1987-88, In the World Through Which I Travel, 1990, and selected panels from The Watering Hole, 1996. The Guggenheim subsequently acquired the wall collage AKA Daddy, joining Harris’s Americas (Triptych) in the museum’s permanent collection.