Opening: JJJJJerome Ellis: A calendar commemorating slaves who escaped their enslavers, 1673-1886

Welcome to the opening of JJJJJJerome Ellis’s solo exhibition A calendar commemorating slaves who escaped their enslavers, 1673-1886. During the exhibition’s opening at Index on Friday 20 November, visitors are invited to join a sound-based performance that moves between the exhibition space and the waterfront of Kungsbrostrand.

Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation is proud to host the first institutional solo exhibition in Northern Europe by JJJJJerome Ellis, titled A calendar commemorating slaves who escaped their enslavers, 1673-1886. The exhibition is produced in partnership with Secession Vienna, where its first iteration was presented earlier this autumn, and KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin, where the third iteration will take place in spring 2027.

JJJJJerome Ellis is a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, musician – and person who stutters. Through their works, they ask what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. Ellis primarily considers themself a musician; in the last decade their practice has also moved towards poetry, photography, performance, drawing and video. Through music, text and drawing, they move along the cracks of this violent yet magnificent world; their attitude softens the edges to the frameworks with which we humans attempt to understand our lives and their violent implications on others.

In Ellis’s practice sound, writing, and improvisation render dysfluency – a term the artist uses in reference to their stutter – not as a deficit, but as a modality of time that resists the violence of normative fluency and racial capitalist temporalities.

JJJJJerome Ellis (b. 1989) lives and works in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. The artist uses any pronoun and has an ongoing practice of spelling their name JJJJJerome Ellis – as their name is the word they stutter on most frequently.

JJJJJerome Ellis’s work has been presented by the Whitney Museum and National Sawdust (New York); Venice Biennale 2023; Haus der Kunst (Munich); Rewire Festival (The Hague); Schauspielhaus Zürich; Chrysler Hall (Norfolk, Virginia); MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts); the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania); and Oklahoma Contemporary (Oklahoma City). They have received commissions from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, The Shed, and REDCAT.

Read more about the exhibition here.