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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
Ecologies of Precarious Abundance: Queer Life and Natures
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Led by Heather Davis with guest faculty Ama Josephine B. Johnstone and Tejal Shah, Ecologies of Precarious Abundance invites us to look again at our toxic worlds, asking what affordances or possibilities may be found. Intended for visual artists who work at the intersection of queer life and ecology, the residency will provide a lens to re-think how we might wish to understand relations with each other and with the other-than-human world.
2 August - 2 September 2022
Finding Common Ground
Tate Liverpool
Joining the panel Ecopoetics and Environmental Justice responding to Bones Tan Jones artwork ‘Dream After Screen’ as part of two-day Symposium and workshop organised by Tate Liverpool and the Paul Mellon Centre.
8 July 2022
THE FEMININE AND THE FOREIGN /NAIROBI LOCAL
The Nest Collective
The world premiere of the Feminine and the Foreign with a Q&A with the film co-directors Mars Masaai and Dr. Njoki Ngumi, two members of the Nest Collective, and also feature insights from documentary protagonists Ama Josephine Budge and Indie Max. Followed by Thames-side garden party hosted in collaboration with Brixton club night LOCAL.
2 July 2022
WE SHOULD ALL BE DREAMING
Black Cultural Archives
We Should All Be Dreaming invites people to spend time listening and dreaming together in an attempt to collectively imagine new futures. Situating itself somewhere between a collective think tank, a choreographed gathering and a performance – the project invites participants to radically dream of new utopian futures together.
23 – 24 June 2022
6 May 2022 Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College World premiere of Putting the Cooker on Low, a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Ama Josephine Budge and writer Dr. Chelsea M. Frazier, moderated by Dr. J.T. Roane (Arizona State University). |  20 June 2022 Birkbeck University of London |  26 April 2022 King's College London |
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 6th November 2021 Storyhouse Literature Festival |
A City Wages Love
Architectural Review, Where do We go from here?
November 2021
Pleasurable Ecologies - Formations of Care: The Impossibilities of Invitation
Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion 3, September 2021
“Pollination as Praxis: The Queer Temporalities of Intimate Ecologies
Conversation Across Place, July 2021
Ama Josephine Budge's A Shoal of Lovers Leads me Home is a " heady, hopeful sensorium"
- Michael Matheson, Anathema: Spec from the Margins
Leap
Platform London, January 2021
No Home Left Behind
Architectural Review, October 2020
“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
Illustrated by Fernanda Peralta
Speculative Fabulations: Beneath Yaba's Garden
Feminist Review: Archives, July 2020
Ama Josephine Budge in conversation with Angela Chan (in) Science Fiction
Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press:
Documents of Contemporary Art, 2020
