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Reviewed by:
  • Black Joy/White Fragility by Joy Mariama Smith
  • Megan Hoetger
BLACK JOY/WHITE FRAGILITY. By Joy Mariama Smith. Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. October 21, 2021.

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.


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

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