Anaïs Duplan

Excerpts from I Need Music, forthcoming from Action Books, 2021, Wall vinyl texts and metal prints, dimensions variable. 

The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, 2021, video. (60 minutes)

DESCRIPTION

In three projects across media, Duplan presses against language’s limitations while presenting expanded possibilities of form. Duplan presents The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch in two channels, which borrows language from Julianne Huxtable’s Mucus in My Pineal Gland (2017) and considers video as ambient. Also shown are excerpts from Blacksapce: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (2019) snippets of text interlaced with images printed on circular metal, recalling the shape of vinyl records. Throughout the space and in conversation with the cohort’s are stanzas from the manuscript I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, forthcoming), which too contemplate upon images (“as page,” or otherwise) and future (“cancelled / due to a thunderstorm”).

BIO

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, and the Bettering American Poetry anthology. Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2020. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He now works as Program Manager at Recess and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Poetry at Columbia University.