Private Party. Presented at the 2018 Paseo Project, Private Party is a live film about a photoshoot. Conceived as a performance piece for a photographer, two models, and a director, Private Party is an opportunity to witness oneself performing in the public gaze. Live video footage and sound, sourced from YouTube and Taos radio formed the backdrop against which performers of color worked through a series of meditations intended to explore personality, ambition, the experience of being seen as a brown body, and love. Participants were invited to watch the film/photoshoot and to take selfies at designated locations. As a durational, live experiment, Private Party explores the friction between technology and intimacy, framing and knowing, seeing and being.
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INNTERDISCPLINE. Celebrating QTPOC artists who use digital & new media to work towards liberation, INNTERDISCPLINE took place on August 28th at Friends and Lovers in Brooklyn. The night featured work by Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Paula Pinho Martins Nacif, Yves B. Golden, Precious Okoyomon, Ray Ferreira, Keijaun Thomas, Sean D. Henry-Smith, Jayson Smith, and a DJ set by Jeremiah. Presented in partnership with Final Fantasy Reading Series and Roshan Abraham, INNTERDISCIPLINE combined live performance with video, music, poetry, and sound art.
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The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch. A video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The sequence is constructed from found footage – largely from music videos and art documentaries – where there is a central figure – the artist – being watched by an audience. Parts of the video have been shown at Mathew Gallery in New York and at the Prelude to the 13th Baltic Triennial at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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“A POEM BY ANAÏS DUPLAN” is a set of three video-poems made for Daata Editions. The videos feature a line-by-line feed of three of Duplan’s poems: “I Think That I Can Love It” – about the freedom or lack thereof the Black female body – “Why Does It Feel Natural to Want to Be Stable for the Lady in the Mirror?” – on gender instability and social machinery, and “The War of Parasites” – a meditation on war, animalia, and sex. Each video-poem is set across found footage, often featuring black-and-white images of white people in idyllic situations, volcanic eruptions, physical conflict, running in fear, running with semi-joy, and abstractions of light. The set of video-poems, “A POEM BY ANAÏS DUPLAN” attempts to synthesize this particular range of audiovisual and phenomenological experience with the intimacy and habitual quiet of the poem’s page.
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The Center for Afrofuturist Studies. An artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City.
