Museum of Impossible Forms is delighted to present an iteration of Consent Lab with Joy Mariama Smith.

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 content-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, Consent Lab moves into practice-based research in the following areas: embodied consent, implicit consent, and explicit consent. The research goal is to work collectively to bolster the practice based framework around consent and agency in a more accessible way by using information and language from our own individual knowledge base(s).

By extracting a working definition of consent as it may be materialized in an expanded context, we will then begin to unpack consent and agency and its relationship to power. Can we create a culture of consent? If not, can we support an environment that facilitates an emergence of consent culture? What and how and where does consent live in systems of de-individualized living? Can consent culture be generative?

About Joy Mariama Smith

A native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, NL, Joy Mariama Smith’s work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in their work is: What is the interplay between the body and it’s physical environment? Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning 20 years.  When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces.

Their work has been performed internationally, including at If I Can’t Dance Edition VI – Event and Duration, Amsterdam; SoLow Festival, Philadelphia; Freedom of Movement, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Ponderosa Movement & Discovery in Stolzenhagen, Germany. Currently, they teach at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam and was a BAK fellow 2019-2020.

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

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