Reviewed by:

• Black Joy/White Fragility by Joy Mariama Smith
• Megan Hoetger

Occupying a small but central gallery on the main exhibition floor of Rotterdam’s Kunstinstituut Melly, Joy Mariama Smith’s provocatively titled Black Joy/White Fragility brought a queer urban nightlife edge to the institution’s fall 2021 program. As a movement artist, educator, and activist, Smith has spent the last decades cultivating a practice rooted in radical Black traditions of refusal and care, which sits at the intersections of art, pedagogy, performance, design, and club culture. In Black Joy/White Fragility, these elements come together as a performance installation that unsettles the general stasis of the arts institution.

In the installation, the props and lighting of a club environment merged with the pedestals and spatial arrangements of an art gallery: crystals and natural oils took their places atop stands as a mixing board, speakers, and subwoofer stood below the gallery’s monumental arched window. In the back corner, a simple neon sign shone in fuchsia pink with the words: “Black Joy.” The soft curves of the cursive lettering and the glittering refraction of the disco ball suspended in the center of the room stood in contrast to the hard shadows of the window’s wrought iron details, counteracting the sharp points of the metalwork with an ephemeral sparkle and a nominal reminder of Black joy. Together with a few strategically placed color LED stage lights, these light-and-shadow plays created a flickering cinematic effect that pulsed with the creeping (sub-)bass of Smith’s techno music playlist (featuring Seven Angels, KILLA, Sophie Ruston, and DJ NEON QUEEN). Literally shaking the bean bags in painter Iris Kensmil’s adjacent gallery of portraiture with deep sonic pulsations, Smith’s installation was something that could be felt before it was legible as something “to be heard.” Starting from a place of resonances, then, Black Joy/White Fragility worked through vibrations, which cut across visual, architectural, and other boundaries. The artist described this in conversation with me as “trying to heal, trying to vibrate the building.”

The link between healing and vibrating says much about the dramaturgy of the performance that activated Smith’s installation. On four days throughout the month-long run of their project, the installation was closed to museumgoers and reserved for a community of QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color) performers, including Sharlan Adams, Esther Arribas, Ieva Barsauskaite, Carly Rose Bedford, Mohamed Boujarra, Devika Chotoe, Dandelion Eghosa, Antonella Fittipaldi, G, Ahmed El Gendy, Ciro Goudsmit, Annick Kleizen, Isabel Kwarteng, Parisa Madani, Mini Maxwell, Anthony Nestel, Emanuel Oladokun, Auro Orso, Ada M. Patterson, Roberto Perez Gayo, Estrellx Supernova, June Yuen Ting, and Michael Ludwig Tsouloukidse. The performers could dance, rest, or converse with one another as they pleased. In this occupation otherwise, the installation took on a double presence: it was an architecturally scaled social sculpture and a site of convening.

Working in and against the spatial cues of white (cube) space, it moved beyond contained abstract notions of language and action, and into the infrastructures of the building where it inverted patterns of racial segregation, confusing both the directionality of the gaze (who was seeing whom?) and exclusionary door policies (visitors and allied white performers could only encounter “the club” from outside the doors of the gallery). And within this expanded social sculpture, a site of convening was carved out, holding space open for the community of performers to gather and share time. What “gathering” meant remained an open invitation: performers could dance together in the installation or dance autonomously with wireless headphones. They could also leave the gallery and move through the art center’s circulation spaces (entryway, bookshop, [End Page 368] halls, stairways, and elevator) with their wireless headphones. Donning oversized and often hand-altered neon T-shirts designed by Smith with inscriptions like “Hard Femme,” “Stop Acting White,” or “Queer Energetic Household,” they were immediately recognizable as a community of performers, but without an expected precondition of always acting together.

Performance documentation of Joy Mariama Smith, Black Joy...

审核人：

• Joy Mariama Smith 的Black Joy/White Fragility
• 梅根·霍特格

Joy Mariama Smith 位于鹿特丹 Kunstinstituut Melly 主展厅的一个小而中央的画廊，其标题为Black Joy/White Fragility的挑衅性为该机构的 2021 年秋季项目带来了酷儿城市夜生活的优势。作为一名运动艺术家、教育家和活动家，史密斯在过去的几十年里一直在培养一种植根于激进的黑人拒绝和关怀传统的实践，这种传统位于艺术、教育学、表演、设计和俱乐部文化的交汇处。在Black Joy/White Fragility中，这些元素作为一个表演装置结合在一起，打破了艺术机构的普遍停滞。

在该装置中，俱乐部环境的道具和照明与艺术画廊的基座和空间布置相融合：水晶和天然油在展台上占据了它们的位置，作为混合板，扬声器和低音炮站在画廊巨大的拱形窗户下方。在后角，一个简单的紫红色霓虹灯标志闪烁着：“Black Joy”。草书字体的柔和曲线和悬挂在房间中央的迪斯科球闪闪发光的折射与窗户锻铁细节的硬阴影形成鲜明对比，用短暂的闪光和名义上的金属制品的尖锐点抵消了提醒黑色的喜悦。再加上几盏精心布置的彩色LED舞台灯，这些光影戏剧创造了一种闪烁的电影效果，伴随着 Smith 的 techno 音乐播放列表（以七天使、KILLA、Sophie Ruston 和 DJ NEON QUEEN 为特色）的匍匐（次）低音。在画家艾里斯·肯斯米尔 (Iris Kensmil) 的相邻肖像画廊中，用深沉的声波脉动摇晃着豆袋，史密斯的装置是一种在清晰可辨为“被听到”之前就可以感觉到的东西。从一个共振的地方开始，然后，Black Joy/White Fragility通过跨越视觉、建筑和其他界限的振动发挥作用。这位艺术家在与我的谈话中将其描述为“试图治愈，试图振动建筑物”。

愈合和振动之间的联系很大程度上说明了激活史密斯装置的表演的戏剧性。在他们为期一个月的项目运行中的四天里，该装置对博物馆观众关闭，并保留给 QTBIPOC（酷儿、跨性别、黑人、土著、有色人种）表演者社区，包括 Sharlan Adams、Esther Arribas、Ieva Barsauskaite , Carly Rose Bedford, Mohamed Boujarra, Devika Chotoe, Dandelion Eghosa, Antonella Fittipaldi, G, Ahmed El Gendy, Ciro Goudsmit, Annick Kleizen, Isabel Kwarteng, Parisa Madani, Mini Maxwell, Anthony Nestel, Emanuel Oladokun, Auro Orso, Ada M. Patterson、Roberto Perez Gayo、Estrellx Supernova、June Yuen Ting 和 Michael Ludwig Tsouloukidse。表演者可以随心所欲地跳舞、休息或交谈。在这个职业中，否则，

在白色（立方体）空间的空间线索中工作，它超越了语言和行动的抽象概念，进入了建筑的基础设施，在那里它颠倒了种族隔离的模式，混淆了凝视的方向性（谁是看到谁？）和排他性的门禁政策（访客和白人表演者只能从画廊门外遇到“俱乐部”）。在这个扩展的社会雕塑中，开辟了一个聚会场所，为表演者社区提供了聚集和分享时间的空间。“聚会”的含义仍然是一个公开的邀请：表演者可以在装置中一起跳舞或使用无线耳机自主跳舞。他们也可以离开画廊，穿过艺术中心的流通空间（入口、书店、[完第 368 页]大厅、楼梯和电梯）与他们的无线耳机。穿着由 Smith 设计的超大号且经常手工修改的霓虹灯 T 恤，上面刻有“Hard Femme”、“Stop Acting White”或“Queer Energetic Household”等铭文，他们立即被识别为表演者社区，但没有预期的先决条件总是一起行动。

Joy Mariama Smith，Black Joy 的性能文档...