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Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose praxis navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse human rights, environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities...
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
For speaking invitations: assistant@amajosephine.me
For projects proposals:
ama@amajosephine.me
Insta @amajosephine
Twitter @pleasureproff
Exhibiting Artworks
Putting the Cooker on Low
May 14th 2022 - ongoing
Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black
womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labour-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses and slippages these anti-erotic modes ofsurvival engender – as felt by both human and non-human ecologies – remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.
Recent/Upcoming Events
Black Ecology: Resistance, Poetics and Imaginaries
Nyabinghi Lab
“The Resiliency Garden is a reimagining of space and an example of what can happen when Black people take control of space and regenerate it as a catalyst for freedom, healing, and liberation. The space lives at the intersection of food, climate, and racial justice and is an homage to a future that serves us all, not just a select few.” – Duron Chavis (urban farmer, educator, change maker)
26 November 2023
The Butterfly Effect: Laura Raicovich on Cultivating Cultural Infrastructure
Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum
The series asks a simple question: Can small shifts in museum practice generate seismic change across our societies? That museums of today face profound challenges is without question; they are a symptom of the urgent and interconnected impact on our societies of the climate emergency, racial and sexual exploitation, wealth inequality, and technological innovation outpacing human comprehension. Yet museums have a role to play in activating solutions to these challenges.
TBC
INTRA-ACTIONS #3:
An Infectious Feeling: Eric Gyamfi and Ama Josephine B. Johnstone
in conversation
VIAD
As part of the Creative Microbiology Research Colab’s (CMRC) Intra-Actions public programme, newly appointed VIAD Research Associate Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone welcomes her longtime colleague and friend Eric Gyamfi, a Ghanaian photographer experimenting with the hybrid nature of analogue, digital and chemical processes, into a conversation exploring of ecological chemical processes, Black, queer erotics, and interspecies futures.
8 October 2023
Bow Skills Panel: exposing the ‘guts’ – artistic labour and future ecologies
Bow Arts
What lies in the intersections of ecology, art, and labour? And how can we embody these ideas as a means to move towards an Otherwise? Join Ama Josephine Budge, Angela YT Chan and Becky Lyon as they reckon with the stickiness of these questions and expose the arcane guts and mechanics of how the arts currently operate.
12 September 2023
Online Lecture Series: Black Feminist Ecopoetics
Black Blossoms & New Orleans House Gallery
A free online course exploring Black Feminist Ecopoetics, inspired by the exhibition by Phoebe Boswell: A Tree Says [In These Boughs The World Rustles], delivered by Black Blossoms with lectures from Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone.
6 September – 27 September 2023
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Queer Utopias
Wysing Arts Centre
Queer Utopias, an intimate mini-festival of queer culture in Wysing’s rural setting, for the LGBTQIA+ community and their friends. Expect relaxed workshops, stimulating conversations, electrifying performances, a ‘zine fair – and a football match! You’ll be accompanied by some of the most exciting artists, writers and performers around… including: Babeworld, Ama Josephine Budge, Diarmuid Hester, Bones Tan Jones, Noreen Masud, Diana Puntar.
2 September 2023
Turning Together: Day 2
FACT Liverpool
Ama Josephine Budge will lead a speculative writing workshop taking Le Guin's famous essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" as a starting point with which to co-create speculative stories not dependent on conflict, gender/kinship/human-nature binaries or "long hard things for bashing and killing".
12 July 2023
Recent Publications
Pollination as Praxis: The
Queer Temporalities of
Intimate Ecologies
INSERT. Artistic Practices as Cultural Inquiries
2023
read here
Locating Blackness In Intimate Ecologies
C& and C&AL Print Issue #12
2023
read here
Subtle Intimacies – Insistent Shadows
UNCHORUS, Freelands Foundation
2023
read here
Ama Josephine Budge's A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home is a " heady, hopeful sensorium"
- Michael Matheson, Anathema: Spec from the Margins
“Ama is exactly the kind of young writer we need, innovative, daring, fantastical and delicious, the UK’s N.K Jemisin meets Tomi Adeyemi.”
- Tosin Coker, The Mouth of Babes
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