Christopher Harris

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged reenactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embody the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.

His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including solo shows at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Tate Modern, TIFF Lightbox, the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin; a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.