"Josef Astor's images capture the space between moments, a difficult and penetrating stasis. The portraits selected for Displaced Persons are multifaceted, unnerving, and surreal. Staging and photographing his peers and muses, Astor intuitively documented key players from intersecting pre-millennial and pre-Internet dance and late-night performance subcultures, assembling a constellation of artists and hybrids who took it upon themselves to reflect a largely oblivious world back onto itself with venomous innocence and shocking self-possession. Astor, in all his subtlety, is one of those hybrids." – Anohni, Josef Astor and the Pall of Stillness

PARTICIPANT INC is proud to present Josef Astor, Displaced Persons, a solo exhibition of photographs, curated by the artist’s longtime friend and subject, Anohni. Best known for his decades of work as a photographer for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and other media outlets, Astor’s exhibition features twenty-two works made outside the commercial realm: largely unpublished photographs of artists and performers who subverted the stereotype and the artifice of the icon in the late 1980s, ‘90s, and ‘00s. Whether a studio portrait or a screen projection tableau, displaced refers to the physical outsidedness and anti-establishments these artist-subjects created, operated within, and, most importantly, made visible and public. Offering a rare opportunity to see Astor’s experimental work, the exhibition foregrounds conceptions of community that value the uncommon; and subjects who authored alternative contexts, depicted here not only as subject matter, but also as testament to Astor’s category-defying collaborations with friends and fellow artists.