Out of Dark Noise

Anaïs Duplan

February 24, 6:30pm
Géza, 306 Maujer

Anaïs Duplan presents a hybrid poetry reading and film screening related to his research for his forthcoming book Out of Dark Noise: The Lineage of Black Experimental Documentary.

Anaïs uses the phrase “dark noise” (borrowed from Lawrence Andrews) to describe the works of Black experimental documentarians whose decolonized creative approaches have generated novel spaces of cultural memory. The idea of dark noise indicates a sort of failed consensual reality, or in Audre Lorde’s terminology, a “chaos of knowledge.” Dark noise is the area outside of the state-sanctioned truth that the justice system, for instance, relies upon.

Out of Dark Noise is organized in the framework of SIREN (some poetics), a group exhibition and a poetics devoted to technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and language. It follows the online lecture performance of the same title that Anaïs presented as an intervention on our homepage on June 6, 2022, as part of The Noon Sirens, the online program that runs parallel to SIREN (some poetics) guest-curated by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot.

This event of free and open to all, prior registration is recommended.

Screenshot from The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch, 2018, courtesy Anaïs Duplan

About the poet

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of the book I NEED MUSIC; Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture; Take This Stallion; and the chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the MoMA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary.
In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He is the recipient of the 2021 QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work, and a 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Duplan is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College, and has taught poetry at The New School, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and others.