Friday, Feb. 6 - Wednesday, March 18, 2026 | Tube Video Gallery

Stock market data from the 2008 financial collapse — Dow Jones, Nikkei, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 — is translated into a musical score. An electronic female voice, processed through vocoder, follows the score with precision. The voice is feminine, like the voices designed to assist us, to serve, to comply. When algorithms are built to help, they are so often given women's voices. The system speaks through the voice it expects obedience from. A human voice enters, not in obedience but in lament. It responds to the data, departs from it, grieves what the numbers cannot feel. It exists within the system while refusing to be ruled by it. The video displays symbols from the Phaistos Disc, an undeciphered Minoan script possibly from a matriarchal Bronze Age society, now scrolling in the format of a stock ticker: ancient mystery conscripted into capitalism's visual language. Beneath the voices, a sustained drone sounds: the ison of Byzantine chant tradition, a single fixed pitch that served as tonal anchor for sacred music. Here it becomes the cost basis, the entry point, the fixed reference against which all market movement is measured, the illusion of stable ground in a system without foundation. Matriarchal symbols forced into patriarchal economic display. Female robot voice obeying the algorithmic score. Human female voice refusing, responding, lamenting. The drone continues beneath it all, as cost basis always does, indifferent to what rises or falls above it. At the close, the human voice fades; the machine inherits its tremor. Nothing holds still. Avásimo: without basis. The ground was never there.

 2026, Single channel audio & video animation
Audio duration: 3'17''

Concept, Artistic Direction: Pavlina Vagioni
Original Score: Audra Verona Lambert
Arrangement & Transcription: Pavlina Vagioni
Vocoder & Electronic Processing: Vangelis Yalamas
Vocals: Pavlina Vagioni
Mixing: Vangelis Yalamas
Video Animation: Tasos Tsiaboulas

About the Artist:
Pavlina Vagioni is a Greek-born interdisciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, whose work spans sculpture, painting, sound, and digital art. She has exhibited at notable venues across the US and Europe, including the Byzantine Museum, Hellenic American Union, Kappatos Gallery (Athens), TANK Space, Lawndale Art Center (Houston), Carillon Gallery (Fort Worth), and Opening Gallery (New York). Vagioni completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts and created a public art project at Houston’s ION Building. Her work is recognized internationally and held in multiple private and public collections, including the MOMus–Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece).

Tube Video Gallery | Nov. 7, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026

​​Red Sourcebook, 2018, 4:12 minutes, color, stereo, HD video

Cooking with the Erotic, 2016, 11:37 minutes, color, stereo, 2-channel, HD video

Finishing a Raw Basement, 2017, 6:41 minutes , color, stereo, HD video

Reparation Hardware, 2018, 4:05 minutes, color, stereo, HD video

Ilana Harris-Babou is a multimedia artist whose video works are an important component of a practice that includes sculpture and object making, performance, and installation. In her projects, Harris-Babou mines the aesthetics of YouTube tutorials, home improvement and cooking shows, and corporate ad campaigns to call attention to how personal and social identities are constructed—and co-opted—by dominant ideologies.

Harris-Babou unsettles the anodyne tone of these vehicles with wit and creative whimsy, utilizing and re-contextualizing mainstream media forms to make explicit the forces that are elided by slick production strategies: social stratification; legacies of structured oppression; and the homogenizing push of consumerism. Fit within a history of artists using satire and mimicry to critique media and communication platforms, Harris-Babou’s videos, many of which feature her own mother, also draw from her personal experience and lexicon of references to infuse her humor with deeply resonant meaning.

Harris-Babou has presented solo exhibitions of her work at Candice Madey Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY (2023); The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University (2023); Artspace New Haven (2022); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2021); Goucher College, Baltimore, MD (2021); Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2020); and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2017). In spring 2023, the artist installed Liquid Gold in Times Square for the Midnight Moment series. Harris-Babou has participated in major exhibitions including the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019), and group exhibitions at The Wellcome Collection, London, UK (2023); California College of the Arts Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA (2021); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2021); and Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2020). She lives and works in Brooklyn and Middletown, CT.

Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Screen still from Decision Fatigue.