art work

Joseph’s research has also been expressed through the creation of performance and moving image works. For much of the last decade they have worked to deepen their understanding of performance art as a ritual practice - a way of tuning the mind and turning the body towards the invisible.

The sweating sensate body is at the heart of this practice.

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA (London), 2022. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Articulated as ‘queer ritual action’, these works emerge influenced by a host of agents, human and otherwise. Expressions of the work draw on a growing material, physical and poetic vocabulary which Joseph typically calls on in a semi-improvisational way, through practices of channeling, divination and exhaustion.

These text/photo/video traces give a sense of the recurrent gestures, objects and totems of the work. Being with loss is a central preoccupation and there is room within this for kinship, desire, eroticism, and connection.

‘One of the special magics of performance art is the vibrant possibility of the live encounter’

Interview in Run Riot, 2021, with Adam Bloodworth - An interview reflecting on Joseph’s practice ahead of PSX: a decade of performance art in the UK.

the pink sky reflects the bloody earth, VO Curations, 2019. Photo by Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz.

Under Scars, Venice International Performance Art Week, 2022. Photo by Lorenza Cini

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA (London), 2022.
Videography by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.

PSX: 10 Hours, Ugly Duck, 2021. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

devotion : seduction, Venice International Performance Art Week, 2020. Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

words by Daniella Valz Gen, 2022

Soil
A suspended carcass Ribbon
A metal bucket
A video projection
A spade
Candles
Needles

The scene itself is full of ghosts and expectation.

I wait in the red light and smell the soil,
the hum gets into my spine :
I feel my inner waters vibrate as I look at dry bones.

The sizzle of a blowtorch Smoke, a faint scent of gas

(My eyes burn)
Embers flicker on the tip of a wooden pole

Stone on a metal spade Stone in a mouth,
play

Knocking about knock knock knock

(A call, persistent)

What is this sense of foreboding? Where are we?
What else is there?
Who?

The sound of fire bursts
Black wax drips on Joseph’s pale chest

—Tattoos Sigils Lace—

Like the carcass that presides over the space
As if saying: we too are already dead

We are with death
in a tangle of shimmery ribbon

An open mouth pulling on cord

Across space Across time Across life

I feel Joseph’s mouth in my spine and my rib cage: pulling at my tendons, my own carcass.

Psychopomp childlike and in black satin, their flesh pierced
as if to say:

I’m here I bleed I’m here

Alive
(I’m here with you)

From blood to clay
From red to fade
A desire to exit
A gesture towards absolute presence and effacement at the same time

The space has been pierced
All that’s left is a sad tender holding

between crisis and stasis I wait, Tactile Bosch, 2019. Photos by zack mennell.

these teeming forms, VSSL Studio, 2021. Photo by zack mennell.