In Acts of Service, Keith Lafuente stages a carnivalesque installation of kinetic and static sculptures that explore the many connotations of “service”—sexual, military, culinary, religious, and altruistic. Animated fabric figures perform cycles of labor and desire: a go-go boy waiter balances on a table, a sailor pole dances on a pig spit, watched by tarsiers and turtles. Their movements repeat endlessly, visible to us but invisible to themselves.
Deeply informed by Filipino hospitality traditions and global inequities of labor shaped by colonial history, Lafuente’s practice complicates ideas of empowerment, degradation, and beauty—layering kink, spectacle, and satire into one unsettling stage.
About Keith Lafuente
Across media, including sculpture, painting, performance, film, and fashion, Keith Lafuente builds colorful worlds that feature characters navigating desire, power, and belonging via adornment and embodiment. Keith plays with Filipino-ness like a fabric that can be cut, sewn, unpicked, and reworked, pulling apart threads of idealized nostalgia for the past, domination by colonial regimes, and culturally ingrained values of service and adaptation. With a camp sensibility, Keith weaves in his own queer, diasporic experiences from growing up in the United States–critically reimagining both Filipino-ness and Americanness.
Keith is a current artist in residence at SoMad. His short film Binibining Iniibig premiered in 2024. His work has been included in exhibitions at, among others, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; New Release, New York; Pracownia Portretu, Poland; PULLPROOF, Pittsburgh; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San José, California. His designs and drag have been featured in publications including The Cut, Cultured, Harper’s Bazaar Hong Kong, and Gayletter. Keith holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.
