A gathering. An invitation. A speculative architecture. A sounding. A call.
In Being Future Beings, choreographer and artist Emily Johnson performs a body-based work within and in response to 2022 Biennial artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition, I AM YOUR RELATIVE. The performance marks the second collaboration between the two, who previously worked together on Johnson’s The Ways We Love and The Ways We Love Better – Monumental Movement Toward Being Future Being(s), performed in and around Gibson’s installation, Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House (2020) at Socrates in New York.
I AM YOUR RELATIVE is a multi-purpose installation featuring fifteen moveable stages that populate the first floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. Over the course of the exhibition, the stages are host to artists’ performances, talks, workshops, and gatherings that amplify community voices past and present and are supported through robust research, coordination, and production.
This program is co-presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (MOCA) and the Toronto Biennial of Art. I AM YOUR RELATIVE (2022) is co-commissioned by MOCA and the Toronto Biennial of Art.
Image credit: Emily Johnson, Being Future Beings, March 27, 2022. Program held at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Toronto Biennial of Art 2022. Photography: Roxanne Fernandes.
In Person
Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto
158 Sterling Rd
Toronto ON
M6R 2B7
March 27
Bio
Emily Johnson (Yup’ik, lives and works in Lenapehoking/New York City, USA) is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award she has created work since 1998 that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment- interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history and role in building futures. Johnson is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future.
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts, serves on Creative Time’s inaugural Think Tank, and is part of a consortium developing the First Nations Performing Arts Network.