JMS is a curator, artist and creative producer. Underpinning these entangled practices is an understanding of art as an embodied encounter between self and other, place and mystery. Joseph’s work explores performance / art as a contemporary modality of ritual, an / other way of experiencing and inhabiting body / space / time, as a technology of processing / mourning / desiring / communing / dreaming.
Expressions of this belief / research have emerged as performances, films and texts, as curatorial and producing projects, as collaborative contexts, talks and workshops.
Much of their / his independent work is held by Future Ritual, a long term curatorial, research and organising practice initiated in 2017. Since 2024, Joseph has worked as Curator, Public Practice at Tate.
Previous roles have included those at Live Art Development Agency, The Place and ]performance s p a c e[. JMS is also co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio.
Across all this work, Joseph remains committed to the live and embodied practices which welcome complexity, senstivity, tension and difficulty, and which call towards the more raw edges of experience.
joseph@futureritual.co.uk
Instagram // Mailing List
Rubiane Maia, Every Time I Trace The Horizon, My Hands Catch Fire [Book-Performance, Chapter III], 2022. Photo by zack mennell.
Future Ritual x ICA (London)
Produced by Future Ritual. Commissioned and presented by ICA (London).
Funded by Arts Council England.
The fog of the here-and-now is ossifying. Contemporary culture is characterised by states of anxiety, alienation and exile. Breaking with these states requires a series of temporal maneuvers. Ritual is an apt symbolic technology for this work, for ritual is a way of entering time and rendering it habitable through communion.
Identifying performance art as a potent contemporary modality for ritual, the performances of this convening represent a plurality of responses to this question: how can the archaic technology of ritual be deployed in the divination, manifestation and sustentation of something else - of alternative [queer] futurities, wherein states of belonging (in difference) are felt deeply and more readily?
Future Ritual activated the ICA between 18 and 29 May, investigating memory, sex, time, collaboration, ecology, power, alienation, intimacy and belonging. The body remains at the heart of each work, immediate and autonomous. Identity, however, is frequently destabilised and diffused towards the imagination of other ways of being in other possible worlds.
Participating artists: Soojin Chang, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Rubiane Maia and Benjamin Sebastian.
> Future Ritual: ICA (London)
> press: Exploring Ritual in Queer Performance Cultures in Artlyst
> press: Joseph Morgan Schofield introduces FUTURERITUAL in Run Riot
Benjamin Sebastian, 3 Reflections², Future Ritual, ICA (London) 2022. Photograph by zack mennell.
Soojin Chang, Heavenly Shower of Banknotes, Future Ritual, ICA (London) 2022. Photograph by zack mennell.
Joseph Morgan Schofield, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, Future Ritual, ICA (London) 2022. Photograph by zack mennell.
practices: curation / film / performance / writing
contexts: Future Ritual / Tate / VSSL studio / ]ps[
years: 2016 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 /