JMS is a curator, artist and creative producer. At the heart of these entangled practices is an understanding of performance art as a potent, contemporary modality of ritual. He / they draws on queer, ecological and esoteric thought to engage with the lost, the unseen, the forgotten. He understands his performances and films as thin places, as ceremony, as a way of practicing sensitivity, of reorienting attention and touching the more raw edges of experience.
As a curator, they activate spaces for collective encounter through Future Ritual, cultivating intergenerational exchange and artist-led research, experimentation and creation. Future Ritual is 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 lives in London (UK) but most often works in dialogue with the wet, windy Pennine moors and Cumbrian fells of the English North West.
joseph@futureritual.co.uk
Instagram // Mailing ListRubiane 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 /