PSX - a celebration of a decade of performance art ! ] Performance S p a c e [ is celebrating its 10th anniversary by looking to the past, present & future(s) of performance art in the UK. This Last Fridays, ]ps[ are continuing sharing their collection of significant ]ps[ archival documentation, in screening 2 artists works: Keijaun Thomas & Joseph Morgan Schofield.
: Video still - Keijaun Thomas - Special Iteration - My Last American Dollar - PAUSE & AFFECT - 2019 - Videographer
> Keijaun Thomas is a New York based artist. Her work in performance, multimedia installation, and poetry explores the labor of black femmes in situations ranging from housework and hairdressing to athletic training and exotic dancing. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, and her poems slip between various modes of address, exploring the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support.
Thomas was a Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient for 2018 and is the inaugural winner of theQueer|Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists.
Thomas underscores the endurance and intimacy care work demands of those expected to perform it predominantly black women, black femmes, and people of color. She aims to build bridges of understanding, community and care through her pieces. Her work centers and focuses on self/communal care in real time and creating safer spaces for black and people of color.
* * *
: Video still - These Teeming Forms - Associate Artist Commission - 2020/21 - In collaboration with Fenia Kotsopoulou, Mitchell Sowden, Zac McGuiness.
> Joseph Morgan Schofield is a performance artist, curator, writer and facilitator. Articulating their practice as a queer ritual action, their work, which foregrounds the immediacy of the sweating, bleeding, wanting, sensate non-binary body, is broadly concerned with desire, particularly in relation to ecology and futurity. They offer performance as a technology of divination; a tool in the creation of contemporary myth; a place of mourning, yearning, processing and communing.
The land, like the body, is an archive. these teeming forms explores porosity: of the body, and the land. The film is a process of communing with the land, of (be)longing with and to it. There is no going back. Queer ecology is enacted here as a process of wilding, looking forwards and out, towards new mythic relations with the land.
More work from Joseph can be found here:www.josephmorganschofield.com
