PROTECT YOURSELF // stop hoping: Joy Ngenda

Who gets to grieve? What does it mean to close one’s self off to family? What happens when the people who are supposed to know you best fail you? As a queer, racialized person living in a city far away from homeland and family, Joy has spent the last several years struggling with these question—questions of identity and family and actualization and embodiment, ability to bring self into being, and the journey to find spaces that reflect and accept all aspects of identity. PROTECT YOURSELF // stop hoping is an immersive visual and auditory experience conceptualized as a reflection of the chaotic and overwhelming nature of long-term grief and the navigation of complex loss within familial relationships. Auditory and visual recordings are further layered within narratives of queerness, racialization, and actualization, and projected to allow viewers to experience a fragment of the artists’ path to embodied experiences of emotionality. - Artist Bio Joy Ngenda is a queer, mixed West African transplant who has been living on unceded Lekwungen lands for the last 4 years. They are a multi-disciplinary artist and sometimes student, with a passion for ethical organizing and community justice. Their artistic practice is rooted in conceptualization of experiential emotion and individual moments both imagined and realized. - Covid - 19 Guidelines · Only one visito... read more...