False Friend

Alina Tenser, Ilanna Harris-Babou, Mira Dayal, Annabel Daou

Opening Reception on Friday, March 31, 2023, from 6-8pm
On view March 30 - May 6, 2023

Press Release | Checklist

Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian-born artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, she makes propositions that elicit physical activation and play. Utilizing industrial and domestic materials and processes she reimagines taken-for-granted social and material relations; mining the entanglements of her experience as an immigrant and parent. Tenser is currently an Assistant Professor in Art + Design at SUNY Purchase College. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; 17Essex, New York, NY, Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, SE; and Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been widely reviewed and written about in the New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Third Rail. She has participated in multiple artist residencies, most notably The Queens Museum Studio Program and Recess Activities. Her first public art installation is currently on view at Memorial Sloan Kettering Chemotherapy Treatment Facility in Brooklyn, NY.

Ilana Harris-Babou lives and works in Brooklyn and Middletown, Connecticut. Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. Her work explores the ways we seek connection and identity through everyday objects. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor to digest painful realities. She has presented solo exhibitions of her work internationally. Institutions include The Highline, New York (2022), Artspace, New Haven (2022); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2021); ICA Chattanooga, Tennessee (2021); Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland (2021); Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2020); and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York (2017). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2021);  Contact Traces, California College of the Arts Wattis Institute, San Francisco, California (2021); and After the Plaster Foundation, Queens Museum, Corona, New York (2020). She has participated in major exhibitions including the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2019). She received her BA in Art from Yale University and an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.

Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her studio work is often site-specific and involves subtle but laborious applications of materials, critical reflections on changing technologies, and formal explorations of the limits of language. Her projects have been shown at Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; NURTUREart, Brooklyn; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; Abrons Art Center, New York; and other spaces. She has also participated in residencies, intensives, and fellowships with A.I.R. Gallery, Art in General, CUE Art Foundation, Ox-Bow School of Art, and SOHO20, and has received grants from Critical Minded, the Liman Foundation, and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. She has taught in the MFA programs at Hunter College and the School of Visual Arts.

Annabel Daou’s work takes place at the intersection of writing, speech, and non-verbal modes of communication. Her paper-based constructions, audio/video works, and performances explore the expressive possibilities of ordinary language and reveal intimacies between individual and collective experience. Frequently, her works evoke moments of rupture, chaos, instability, and misunderstanding but always with the tenuous possibility of repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Her work has been shown at The National Museum of Beirut; The Park Avenue Armory, New York; KW, Berlin; The Drawing Room, London; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Public collections include the Baltimore Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. In 2019-20, Daou was a Pollock-Krasner resident at ISCP. Recent solo exhibitions include DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Gods, and Grifters at Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and Only If at signs and symbols in New York. 

Parent Company is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition entitled False Friend, featuring work by Mira Dayal, Annabel Daou, Ilanna Harris-Babou, and Alina Tenser. 

A false friend is a linguistic term for a word that looks or sounds similar to a word in a different language but varies significantly in meaning. For example, in English 'gift' means a notable talent or a thing given willingly to someone without payment. In German ‘gift’ means poison or toxin. 

False friends teach us that meaning is non-transferable and familiarity can lead you astray. The term also imagines a dichotomy between friends and foes in language. Words are imbued with anthropomorphic characteristics. A false friend is like a trojan horse, permeating our understanding but disrupting our comprehension. Each artist in the exhibition uses language, semiotics, and translation as tropes in their work. They share an affinity in that they employ a poetic, open-ended use of language. The exhibition underscores the inherently multifaceted nature of translation and meaning.