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, will form the backdrop against which performers of color will work through a series of meditations intended to explore personality, ambition, the experience of being seen as a brown body, and love. Participants are 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.

Community collaborators: Las Pistoleras Instituto Cultural de Arte performers: Simone Williams, Krystle McCabe and Marti Segura, El Prado, New Mexico

About the artist: Anaïs Duplan is the author of 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.) As a curator, Duplan has facilitated artists’ projects and exhibitions in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, Reykjavík, and Copenhagen. Duplan’s video art has appeared or is forthcoming in exhibitions at Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in LA. Duplan is the founder of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, and is currently a joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.