Through sound, language and interruption, JJJJJerome Ellis reimagines time as a space for resistance, relation and Black fugitivity.
9 September 2026
At Vienna’s Secession, interdisciplinary artist JJJJJerome Ellis invites audiences to reconsider how we experience time, language and the rhythms that structure everyday life. ‘An unfinished calendar that commemorates slaves escaping their enslavers, 1673–1886′ brings together Ellis’ expansive engagement with performance, sound, text and improvisation.
Central to Ellis’ practice is an exploration of dysfluency and the possibilities contained within interruption. Rather than approaching stuttering as an absence or deficiency, Ellis considers the pause as a space with its own duration and agency. Silence, hesitation and repetition become ways of resisting expectations around fluent speech, productivity and normative understandings of time.
These ideas unfold through a practice concerned with the relationship between body, sound and language, opening space for nonlinear and improvisational forms of knowledge. Ellis asks what might emerge when communication is allowed to resist speed, clarity and easy transcription.
Curated by Bettina Spörr, the exhibition positions listening as both an artistic and political act, inviting audiences to encounter interruption not as a failure of communication, but as a generative space for difference, opacity and new possibilities of relation.
This exhibition is on view at Secession, Vienna, Austria from 11 September to 22 November 2026.
