JJJJJerome Ellis: A Poetics of Interruption in Contemporary Sound and Text Art

This exhibition by JJJJJerome Ellis radically reconfigures our relationship with time, language, and readability, proposing a poetics of interruption. Ellis's work explores how speech disruptions and linguistic breaks can resist normative flows and capitalist temporalities, transforming stuttering into a site of resistance and opening up new possibilities for being in time.

JJJJJerome Ellis's practice radically reconfigures our relationship with time, language, and readability, crafting a deeply personal yet structurally political poetics of interruption. In performances, sounds, texts, and improvisations, Ellis treats speech disruptions not as a deficit but as a modulation of time that resists the dominion of normative language flow and capitalist temporalities. Ellis's stuttering 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, and the withholding of communication becomes an ethical strategy. Ellis’s art questions what it means to live differently in time, to inhabit broken rhythms as spaces for improvisation, connection, 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, such as in _The Clearing,_ a space opens up for non-linear, improvised forms of knowledge that emerge from listening, from hesitation, and from what escapes transcription. Ellis’s work is not simply about disability or identity, but about the structures that attempt 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, a continuous negotiation between body, sound, and time. Thus, space is created for opacity and deviation; we are invited to listen to what normative systems cannot capture, and to embrace the dissonance of this listening.

This exhibition is part of the Secession's programming. General information and tickets can be found via the Secession's website, with a link provided to their ticketing partner, Eventjet. Please visit the official website for the most current admission and ticketing details, as this page does not provide specific pricing or booking information for this exhibition alone.