JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis’s work radically reconfigures our relationship to time, language, and legibility, crafting a deeply personal yet structurally political poetics of interruption. In performances, sound works, texts, and improvisations, Ellis treats speech impediments not as a deficiency but as a modulation of time that resists the dominion of normative linguistic flow and capitalist temporalities. Ellis’s stutter becomes a site of rupture and refusal, an opening where silence is not absence but a sovereign pause. Speaking thus transforms into a form of resistance, where delay becomes duration, the absence of communication an ethical strategy. Ellis’s art asks what it means to live differently in time, to inhabit fractured rhythms as spaces of improvisation, relation, and Black fugitivity.

Ellis’s practice destabilizes the architectures of language and authorship as such. In performances and sound compositions, as well as in the rhythms of written language—for example, in The Clearing—a space opens for nonlinear, improvised forms of knowledge that emerge from listening, from hesitation, and from what evades transcription. Ellis’s work is not simply about disability or identity but about the structures that seek to control and erase difference, and the possibilities that arise from resisting these structures. The flow of language here is not a goal but a question, an ongoing negotiation between body, sound, and time. This creates space for opacity and deviation; we are invited to hear what normative systems cannot grasp, and to embrace the dissonance of this hearing.

In cooperation with Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, and KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin