Ashanti Harris
Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick Ashanti Harris, Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2021. Photo by Alan Dimmick
Ashanti Harris is a visual artist, teacher and researcher. Her work includes dance, performance and installation and focuses on the social implications of the movements of people across cultural and historical borders.
She explores particularly the West African and Caribbean diaspora. In these works each mask is made using techniques learnt from Caribbean Carnival culture.
Emi Ori Cse in Copper, 2019
Copper mesh, thread, sequin trim
Ashanti Harris: I was born in Guyana and then moved to the UK when I was a kid. And being Guyanese has always been a really important part of my identity, especially when we moved to the UK because it was this sort of place that my family needed to keep alive for me, because it didn’t exist in my immediate surroundings. So the way that Guyana was kept alive was through food, it was kept alive through stories. It was also kept alive through art, and by art I mean going to see if there was any kind of exhibition about the Caribbean, we would go and see it, and I would go to Afro-Caribbean dance classes. And I guess just all of these different ways that you can experience culture, whilst you’re in a different culture.
Biography
Ashanti Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist, researcher and lecturer. Working with performance, facilitation, sound and moving image, installation and writing, her work disrupts historical narratives and reimagines them from a Caribbean diasporic perspective. Ashanti Harris originally trained in sculpture, and engaging with materials and physical making processes remains an important part of her work. Alongside this, she is drawn to the expanded ways an artwork can be experienced, and this has led her to working with performance, movement and dance as elements within her multi-disciplinary art practice. She works with both sculpture and performance as processes which embody cultures, ancestral legacies and human lived experience through the physical act of making. The works presented in this exhibition are part of a wider body of work which honours and remembers ancestral histories.
Recent commissions and exhibitions include Jerwood Staging Series 2022, Jerwood Arts, London (2022); Dancing a Peripheral Quadrille, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh (2022); An Exercise in Exorcism, GoMA, Glasgow (2021); Opening Night, Timehri Film Festival, Georgetown (2021), JUMBIES, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2021); This Woman’s Work, Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami (2021); Miraculous Noise, Viborg Kunsthal, Viborg (2021); OHCE, Radiophrenia, 87.9fm (2020); Being Present, OGR, Torino (2020); In The Open, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2020).