Ama Josephine Budge - Writer / Artist / Curator
Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist who explores the kinships between Blackness, feminism, decolonial aesthetics, queer erotics and ecology to form a praxis she has named Intimate Ecologies, working toward liberatory interspecies futures.
Usually based in London, Ama can also be found loitering around the fried egg stalls of Accra, or gallery bookshops in New York City.
Installations
Ama's artworks have been commissioned and exhibited internationally. Some work is available to tour, please get in touch if you or your space are interested.
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.
The Roots Of Our Hands Deep As Revolt: Entangled Colonialities of the
Green
Nyabinghi Lab
26 Nov 2023
Mudmind 2023: A concave space transcript
By Ama Josephine Budge
A text for three voices
Commissioned by Sam Smith for A concave space
Volume Festival
22 Sep – 8 Oct 2023
Queer Nature
Temperate House, Kew Gardens
Saturday 30 September – Sunday 29 October 2023
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New month-long festival celebrates the connections between queer people, plants and fungi
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Large-scale commission from acclaimed New York-based artist Jeffrey Gibson
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New festival garden by Patrick Featherstone in collaboration with the Kew Youth Forum
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LGBTQ+ scientists, horticulturists, artists, writers, and more come together in a film-based installation exploring personal experiences of queerness and nature
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Two original spoken word pieces by LiLi K. Bright and Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone
Putting the Cooker on Low (film)
Common Ground
May 4th - 7th 2023
Common Ground began last fall and now continues in the growing season. We invite you to experience four newly commissioned works from artists whose practices engage with food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights. Their work gives us an opportunity to imagine together a more equitable, sustainable, and healthful future.
Common Ground is the fourth edition of the Fisher Center LAB Biennial, a thematic festival that invites and commissions artists to create new works that grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time.
Apocalypse Reading Nook
Kampanagel, Performative Book Fair (Hamburg)
May 11th - 15th 2023
Within the fair, British artist Ama Josephine Budge opens a portal for time travelers with the APOCALYPSE READING NOOK HAMBURG, a traveling mini-variant of her installation “The Apocalypse Reading Room”: Upon entering the cabin, visitors* find themselves in an apocalyptic future - with the invitation to delve into texts that do not primarily look back to what was, but rather try their hand at dreaming as well as practical guidance to new worlds. Stay as long as you like, you have time.
DeComposure
Screening online at Rotten.TV
November 4th - December 4th 2021
DeComposure, by British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, is a meditation on the decomposition of British Empire. Considering that a perceived deficit of economies of “composure” > aka the aesthetics and performances of Christian European civility/civilisation > became a crucial argument for the de-humanisation, racialisation, colonisation and enslavement of Black people, DeComposure reflects on the ways that whiteness as innocent/saviour and whiteness as natural/mastery is fraying and coming apart at the seams in violent and harmful ways. This white grief is like a virus, highly contagious and indiscriminate in its ability to discriminate, to violate, to hate and harm and bring the world burning down with it. But ash becomes (a) fecund matter.
DeComposure was commissioned by artist Daniel Lie and Jupiter Artland, in partnership with Cemeti Institute for Arts and Society (Indonesia) and Casa do Povo (Brazil) and supported by The British Council Digital Collaboration fund.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Describe your image
Describe your image
On Touching
Jupiter Artland
July - October 2021
Initially a text commissioned by mixed-media artist Alberta Whittle, "On Touching" was here developed into a meditation on time and ancestry, ritual and labour, dreaming a space in which Black women borne through traditions of caring for lifeways and universes, might yearn for something like silence, something like pleasure, something like touch. This work considers what Blackness might look like in poses of rest and ecstacy, not in an ephemeral future but now, and always.
Commissioned as part of the group show surrounding Whittle's solo work RESET at Edinburgh's Jupiter Artland.
Credit: RESET, Courtesy Jupiter Artland, Images Harvey Pearson
The Pleasure Grounds:
resident at Ingestre Orangery
June - October 2021
Ama was an artist in residency at the Ingestre Orangery, developing some new work with a focus on pleasure...
Ingestre Orangery opens their contemporary art programme with a new online exhibition event: The Pleasure Grounds opening on 23rd October. From ancient Britain through our colonial past to our present Adam Moore, Verity Birt and Ama Josephine Budge engage with the Orangery site using pleasure as protest, movement practices and archeological digging to investigate and interpret this site of multiple imported identities, show, and pleasure.
Credit: Courtesy of Ama Josephine Budge, Images Angela Johnstone
The Waters that Move Within Me:
Part of "Silence is a Commons" at Casco Art Institute
September 14th 2021
Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons invites you to its exhibition program Het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons), featuring four solo shows of distinguished artistic practices and languages by Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom, Ama Josephine Budge, and Mire Lee. Each artist presents forms of communication that transgress the norms and habits shaped by power and capital-driven media at Casco Art Institute, the Netherlands (free)
Credit: Courtesy of Ama Josephine Budge, Images Rosa Paardenkooper