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Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith co-convenes a gathering as part of the Fellowship at BAK in February 2020. Photo Tim Janssen.

Joy Mariama Smith

Performance, installation, and movement artist and educator Joy Mariama Smith’s work focuses on issues related to visibility, projected identities, and self-representation in different contexts, and investigates the interplay between the body and its cultural, social, and physical environment. In their* dance, performances, and installations, they create spaces in which the distinction between spectator and participant becomes blurred and visitors are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which they deal with space. They teach at SNDO-School for New Dance Development, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Their work has been performed internationally, including at Freedom of Movement, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018; If I Can’t Dance Edition VI – Event and Duration, Amsterdam, 2016; SoLow Festival, Philadelphia, 2015; and Ponderosa, Stolzenhagen, 2013. Smith lives and works in The Hague.

 

*They/them/their: third person singular gender-neutral pronoun.

Joy Mariama Smith

Performance, installation, and movement artist and educator Joy Mariama Smith’s work focuses on issues related to visibility, projected identities, and self-representation in different contexts, and investigates the interplay between the body and its cultural, social, and physical environment. In their* dance, performances, and installations, they create spaces in which the distinction between spectator and participant becomes blurred and visitors are encouraged to reflect on the ways in which they deal with space. They teach at SNDO-School for New Dance Development, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam. Their work has been performed internationally, including at Freedom of Movement, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018; If I Can’t Dance Edition VI – Event and Duration, Amsterdam, 2016; SoLow Festival, Philadelphia, 2015; and Ponderosa, Stolzenhagen, 2013. Smith lives and works in The Hague.

 

*They/them/their: third person singular gender-neutral pronoun.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

Joy Mariama Smith’s research praxis works with consent and agency as related to the contemporary. Smith begins with an understanding that moving toward a consent-based culture decentralizes hunger for power, and operates and catalyzes an important radical care, nurturance culture. Looking at consent’s relationship to power and privilege, Smith moves into practice-based research in the following areas: embodied consent, implicit consent, and explicit consent. Challenging the “universality” of the notion of consent, Smith looks to histories of consent and agency as well as their current definitions; uses cross-genre excavation to unearth ways to define and access a language of consent in the contemporary socio-political art context; collectively bolsters the theoretical frameworks around consent and agency in more accessible ways by using information and language from sources that already have a clear consent-based culture (e.g., BDSM and kink, Contact Improvisation, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Modern Circus-Partner Acrobatics); aims to raise awareness around consent and agency by using art and action, and looks at how consent culture exists (or does not) in various institutions. Can a culture of consent be created? If not, how to support an environment that facilitates an emergence of consent culture? What, how, and where does consent live in systems of de-individualized living? Can consent culture be generative? Why, when, and how was consent left out of realizing institutional environments? How to create institutions where emotional intelligence, de-centralized knowledge production, radical care, and empathy serves as frameworks for working through consent?

How to Assemble Now (BAK Public Studies)

BAK 2017/2018 Fellow Isshaq Al-Barbary and 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith are among the contributors to BAK’s Public Studies Program How to Assemble Now, taking place In August and September 2020.   Read more about the program here.

A Conversation on: The Power of Doing Nothing

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith and BAK 2017/2018 BAK Fellow Quinsy Gario join Framer Framed for A Conversation on: The Power of Doing Nothing (2020), a radio program discussing productivity, refusal, and the racialized inequalities of rest. 

Consent, Logic, and Loss: Fellows Intensive

In February, the BAK 2019/2020 Fellows come together for another Fellows Intensive. This week experiments with various communication practices being researched by Joy Mariama Smith and Mijke van der Drift, the BAK Fellows who co-convene this intensive along with BAK, and Curator of the BAK 2019/2020 Fellowship Program Whitney Stark and focuses on  consent, and […]

Mad About Study, a Training with Joy Mariama Smith

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Joy Mariama Smith leads a training as part of Trainings for the Not-Yet (14 September 2019–12 January 2020), an exhibition as a series of trainings, in October 2019 at BAK. The training addresses collective reading and writing, conversations, somatics, movement research, karaoke, and more, culminating in a dance party and public intervention. […]

Rehearsing in Public with the BAK Fellows

On Wednesday 12 February 2020, BAK 2019/2020 Fellows Mijke van der drift and Joy Mariama Smith, along with BAK, co-convene a participatory panel. Along with artist Ahmed El Gendy and poet and activist Nat Raha, they rehearse in public experimental and collective practices that they are trying out in their research. The participatory panel aims to […]

Program

sonic science fiction transmission

12 September 2020, 12.00-21.45

Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement