PARTICIPANT INC presents AKA Daddy, an installation/performance by Lyle Ashton Harris. Harris returns to performance for the first time in over a decade with AKA Daddy, a new experimental multi-channel video installation that represents 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 (the Ghanaian father of the artist’s former partner Prince) in Kumasi, Harris’s installation/performance 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.

Sunday, May 20, 7-9pm
Opening Reception and Performance

Sunday, June 24, 7pm
Lyle Ashton Harris in conversation with Khary Simon