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

Opening in November 2026, Index is pleased to present a solo exhibition by JJJJJerome Ellis, a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, musician and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. In their practice, JJJJJerome uses sound, writing, and improvisation to render dysfluency – a self-coined term to describe their stutter – not as a deficit, but as a modality of time that resists the violence of normative fluency and capitalist temporalities.

The exhibition at Index features a newly produced work – 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. Specifically, the archival material entails the collation of newspaper advertisements for the recapture of enslaved people – in JJJJJerome’s words, enslaved elders – who achieved liberation from those who claimed ownership of them.

By interweaving personal narratives and ads from different time periods, JJJJJerome subverts linear time, allowing different individuals to coexist not only with each other but also with the now in which we encounter them.

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

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’s work has recently 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.

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