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

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.

The exhibition at Index features a new iteration of a work produced for the exhibition presented at Vienna Secession – a spatial and visual transfiguration of archival newspaper material to produce a page–a–day calendar within Index’ space. The work is based on newspaper material that documents Black fugitivity across the US, UK, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Specifically, the archival material entails the collation of newspaper advertisements for the recapture of enslaved people – in Ellis’s words, enslaved elders – who achieved liberation from those who claimed ownership of them.

For the artist, A calendar commemorating slaves who escaped their enslavers, 1673-1886 highlights the potential that exists each day for ceremony, to commemorate these people, their resistant subjecthood and their will to freedom:

“The idea is that every single day of the year is the anniversary of many enslaved people having escaped. So, because it’s every day of the year, it’s like every day of time, and there is a ceremony that’s (aaaaaa)available each day. It’s a ceremony.”

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.

The exhibition is produced in cooperation with Secession, Vienna, and KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Find more information about JJJJJerome Ellis https://www.jjjjjerome.com