Anaïs Duplan

Anaïs Duplanb. 1992, Jacmel, Haiti

B.A., Bennington CollegeM.F.A., Iowa Writers’ Workshop

BooksBlackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, Black Ocean, 2020 [forthcoming]9 Poems/The Lovers, Belladonna*, 2018Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus, Monster House Press, 2017Take This Stallion, Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016

See published poems and essays here.

Group Exhibitions and ScreeningsThe Condition of Being Addressable, ICA Los Angeles, 2020What Is Feminist Art?, Smithsonian Institution, 2019Joyous Dystopia, Daata Editions x Bass Museum, 2019Screenshots: Video Launch with Daata Editions and DIS, NeueHouse, 2019Radical Reading Room, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019Give Up the Ghost, Baltic Triennial XIII, 2018The Only Thing That’s New Is Us, Mathew Gallery, 2017Post-Cyber Feminist International, ICA London, 2017#WanderingWILDING: Movement as Movement, Daata Editions, 2016

https://worksofanais.com/publications/

Readings and PerformancesA Listening Party with Sable Elyse Smith, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019In Conversation: On Top of All This, The High Line, 2019The Artists’ Voice: Anaïs Duplan, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019Emerging Writers Reading Series: Anaïs Duplan, NYU, 2019Anaïs Duplan, a Reading and Conversation, Brown University, 2019Tuxedo Mascs: A Transmasculine Poetry Reading, Bluestockings, 2019Anaïs Duplan and Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 2019VERSES. VOL 1 x Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, The Kitchen, 2019unbag: Reverie Launch Party, Local Project, 2018Anaïs Duplan, University of Notre Dame, 2018Celebrate Winter While We Still Have Seasons, Housing Works, 2018Brown Paper Zine and Small Press Fair, Barnard College, 2018Belladonna* Roll Call Reading Series with Anaïs Duplan & Yumi Dineen Shiroma, Belladonna* Collaborative, 2018jubilat/Jones Reading Series hosts Anais Duplan and Zach Savich, UMass Amherst, 2017University of Richmond Poetry Festival: Reading with Anaïs Duplan, Tarfia Faizullah, and Peter LaBerge, University of Richmond, 2017Monster House Presents: A reading by Anaïs Duplan, Fell Gallery, 2017Poetry Poetry VII with Chen Chen, Anaïs Duplan, Rajiv Mohabir & Monica Sok, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2017Anaïs Duplan & Loma (Christopher Soto), Poetry Project, 2016Segue Reading Series: Anaïs Duplan & Marie Buck, Zinc Bar, 2016

Workshops and TalksBlack Curators’ Roundtable, Iowa City Public Library, 2019Black Secrets: On Black Musics and the Occult, Montez Press Radio, 2019 Outside the Box: Anaïs Duplan on Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath, New Museum, 2019

From Score to Speculative Lit with Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Writer Anaïs Duplan, Brooklyn Public Library, 2019Visiting Curator Lecture, Williams College Graduate School of Art, 2018Meet Over Lunch: Anaïs Duplan presents the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Residency Unlimited, 2018Poetics of Emotional Research, Poet’s House, 2018

Selection CommitteesBrooklyn Art Council Community Art Grant, 2019Queer|Art|Prize for Sustained Achievement, 2018

Selected Bibliography“Silence in Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus and Take This Stallion,” Ploughshares, 2019“Black curators discuss ‘insiders and outsiders’ in the art world,” Daily Iowan, 2019“Going Into My Depths,” Mask Magazine, 2018“THE TOXIC AND THE LYRIC IV: ON ANAÏS DUPLAN: RADICAL INTIMACY AS NEW HISTORY POEM; AS WOUND AND AS CO-BODY; THE SHAKING APART OF ROBERT LOWELL; STRANGE FRUIT AS IED,” Fanzine, 2017“Poet delves into a Civil War spy’s hidden history,” PBS News Hour, 2016

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the au-thor of a forthcoming book of essays on black digital media art-ists, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a poetry chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnas-sus (Monster House Press, 2017). His writing has been published by Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, and Poetry Society of America.

Duplan’s video and performance work has been shown at Flux Fac-tory, 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.

Duplan is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS), a residency program for artists of color. The CAS is based in Iowa City, where Duplan received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2017. As an independent curator, he has facilitated artist projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. 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.

Photo credit: Walid Mohanna

Why Does It Feel Natural to Want to Be Stable for the Lady in the Mirror?, HD video, 2:51

A POEM BY ANAÏS DUPLAN is a set of three video-poems created for Daata Editions. An experiment in melding the video screen with the page-of-text, the vid-eos feature a line-by-line feed of three of Duplan’s po-ems: 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?, a poem on gender instability in the age of social technology; and finally, The War of Parasites, a meditation on war, anima-lia, and sex.

Each video-poem is set across found footage from ar-chival and/or educational films, 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 at-tempts to synthesize this particular range of audiovisu-al and phenomenological experience with the intimacy and habitual quiet of the poem-page.

All videos can be accessed via Daata Editions or upon request.

https://daata-editions.com/artists/anas-duplan

I Think That I Can Love It, HD video, 2:24The War of Parasites, HD video, 3:08

All videos can be accessed via Daata Editions or upon request.

https://daata-editions.com/artists/anas-duplan

Paradigms for Liberation I-III

We turn to history for stories that inform our present moment. After all, they say that history repeats itself. Similarly, our memories form the basis of the stories we tell about ourselves in the present. Paradigms for Liberation I-III is interested the role of narrative construction in the formation of discrete personal identities. It draws from a shared archive, YouTube, to investigate the stories we tell about ourselves and our relationships––and celebrates the redundancies, repetitions, circularities, ambiguities, and breakdowns in those stories.

This video can be accessed via Daata Editions or upon request.

Paradigms for Liberation I-III, HD video, 5:23

https://daata-editions.com/artists/anas-duplan

The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch

The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch is video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The se-quence is constructed from found footage, largely sourced from music videos and art documentaries that focus on a be-loved public figure. The video attempts to excavate moments of intimacy and shared attention from mass-produced digital artifacts.

The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, installation shots, Prelude to the 13th Baltic Triennial, HD video, 3 hours

Watch a trailer. Full video available upon request.

https://vimeo.com/261646433

Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware

In Robert Colescott’s 1975 painting George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American His-tory Textbook, the famed American inventor is depicted standing at the bow of a rowboat making its way across an intrepid Delaware River. Carver is accompanied by a band of Sambo-esque figures, including one Revolution-ary War army general who hugs the American flag with a kind of serenity about his expression. The painting is a response to—or a refusal of—an earlier painting by a German American artist, completed in 1851, showing George Washington and his all-white cadre in the same scene.

Ode to the Happy Negro exists both as a video and a poem. Both explore black selfhood and sexuality against the backdrop of Colescott’s satire.

Ode to the Happy Negro Hugging the Flag in Robert Colescott’s George Wash-ington Carver Crossing the Delaware, HD video, 3:22

Watch the video or read the poem.

https://vimeo.com/268831446https://poets.org/poem/ode-happy-negro-hugging-flag-robert-colescotts-george-washington-carver-crossing-delaware

9 Poems/The Lovers

Published by the Belladonna* Series, 9 Poems/ The Lovers is a book of nine poems and screenshots. The poems are a series of ekphrastic responses to works by video artists and exper-imental filmmakers of color, including Martine Syms, Mona Hatoum, Tony Cokes, and Kevin Jerome Everson. The poems are accompanied by screenshots from The Lovers Are the Audi-ence Who Watch.

Available online and upon request.

http://www.belladonnaseries.org/chaplets/

Private Party

Conceived as a performance piece for a photographer, two models, and a director, Private Party was an opportunity to wit-ness 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, am-bition, the experience of being seen as a brown body, and love. As a durational, live experiment lasting four hours, Private Party explored the friction between technology and intimacy, framing and knowing, seeing and being.

Read the performance score.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WNLCfzYZ1nQpfNlzOtbx3Y1GMxduJ0ZTnDtZ294ZftE/edit?usp=sharing

A public program hosted at Friends and Lovers, INNTERDIS-CPLINE celebrated QTPOC artists who use performance and new media to work towards liberation. 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, and Jayson P. Smith. Presented in partner-ship with Final Fantasy Reading Series and Roshan Abraham, IN-NTERDISCIPLINE combined live performance with video, music, poetry, and sound art.

INNTERDISCIPLINE

Keijuan Thomas

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (CAS) is an initiative to reimagine the futures of marginalized peoples by gen-erating dynamic working spaces for artists of color. Since 2016, the CAS has hosted fully-funded residencies for artists of color whose work investigates black futurity. In conjucntion with artists-in-residence, CAS produces lec-tures, workshops, public forums, and exhibitions on the intersections of race, technology, and the diaspora.

Past CAS artists-in-residence are Tiona McClodden, Louis Chude-Sokei, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Alexandria Ereg-bu, Krista Franklin, Devin Cain, Terence Nance, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Jade Ariana Fair, Celia Peters, and Justin Allen.

Krista Franklin, ...to take root among the stars, exhibition detail, 2016

Anonymous Donor

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Anonymous donations are given either voluntarily or invol-untarily. At one end of the spectrum, an anonymous dona-tion represents the self-effacing gesture of a philanthropist. On the other end of the spectrum is the systemic erasure of the work of dehumanized laborers.

As an exhibition, Anonymous Donor considers the hidden contributions that have helped shape our contemporary moment.

Inspired by ere ibeji figures––Yoruba sculptures created to honor the spirit of a deceased twin––the exhibition features works by Kara Walker, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Jordan Weber, American Artist, and the Yoruba peoples. All of the artwork collected in the exhibition sheds light on the path we have taken to get to the present moment and sug-gests, at each turn, a parallel (or twin) story to the widely accepted narrative.

A newly commissioned work by American Artist re-imag-ines contemporary technology with black consumers in mind, while Alma Thomas’ work reminds us of black wom-en’s participation in abstract art movements. The works by Kara Walker and Elizabeth Catlett illuminate lineages of in-visible caretaking and emphasize interdependence over in-dependence, while Jordan Weber’s meditation cushions cre-ate a reflective moment in which to contemplate the role of air pollutants in our nation’s history. Finally, the two pairs of Yoruba ere ibeji sculptures suggest that the living and the dead may be more intertwined than meets the eye.

Figge Art Museum, June 29 – October 21, 2019

CONTACT

agduplan@gmail.comwww.worksofanais.com