The political contexts and consequences of animation have changed so that digital animation is now deployed in human rights tribunals, global activism campaigns and speculative future visions. The Animate Assembly research network will explore the implications of these new deployments of animation from three angles: Anime, Animism, Anima. Animate Assembly 12 welcomes contributions from Ama Josephine Budge, Kohei Saito and Rebecca Carson.
5 November, 10.30am, Birkbeck University of London (free)
The National Women's Studies Association leads the field of women’s studies in educational and social transformation. Established in 1977, NWSA has more than 2,500 members worldwide. Our annual conference regularly draws more than 2,200 attendees and is the only annual meeting in the US exclusively dedicated to showcasing the latest feminist scholarship. Ama Josephine Budge presents her research: Intimate Ecologies/Tentacular Tendencies as part of the panel: Machines and Monsters.
14 November, 2.35pm, Hilton Union Square, San Francisco (ticketed)
Join us for lunch and a discussion by UK based, Black speculative writer, curator and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge on the speculative fabulation on queer archives and Intimate Ecologies in Ghana. Junuada Petrus, Dakota land born filmmaker, queer artmaker, and author of The Stars and the Blackness Between Them will give a full creative response.
19 November, 12pm, Soul Bowl, Minneapolis (free)
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.
14 September, 12pm, Casco Art Institute, the Netherlands (free)
Join Ama Josephine Budge and Alberta Whittle for a performative reading and collaborative conversation centred around Budge’s new text Fragments of Exercises For Learning How To Remember / To Member The Harems that Haunt Delicately.
This new work has been written in response to Whittle’s work and is published as part of our accompanying publication which is available in to view in the galleries, and purchase online and in DCA shop.
31 October, 12pm, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (free, but please book)
Building on frameworks of Black feminist pleasure, science fiction, ecological evolutions, and queer tantra training, Breathe. Speculate. Come. incorporates breath, free writing, mark-making and pleasure vocalisations to rest, resist, reimagine and rebuild. Led by Ama Josephine Budge, the closed session will centre queer, POC and Black gender non-conforming, non-binary, trans and femme people.
20 July, 1pm, ICA (ticketed)
Artists discuss ecology, the environment and sustainability. Ama Josephine Budge presents an Image of Tomorrow - Reading Rotimi Fani-Kayode's Bodies of Experience Through the Potentiality of Intimate Ecologies (19.30–19.45)
26 July, 6-10pm, Tate Modern
This one day conference will consider questions of authorship and power within the archive, and how the materials contained within them can be mobilised from their static locations and repurposed within academic, artistic, radical or imaginary frameworks.
18 July, 10 - 6pm, Birkbeck
Speculative writer, curator, researcher and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge transposes you into a time-space-glitch, where queer Black futures are possible, and multispecies justice holds the imperial and colonial anchors of climate change to account. Ama chose Hampstead Heath in North London for her walk, taking us on a journey through a childhood split between London, Cornwall and Accra.
The second live event from the Apocalypse Reading Room welcomes Ted Hughes Award winner Jay Bernard to discuss how narratives are shaped, figures forgotten, and how poetry, politics and history can create alternative futures. Jay will present readings from their work Surge: Side A, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the 1981 New Cross Fire.
2 May, 7-9pm, Free Word (ticketed)
Angela Chan / Worm will present research on communicating climate change through contemporary Chinese speculative and science fiction, and explore the interconnected environmental and socio-economic issues in China today. Responding to Angela, writer, curator and artist Ama Josephine Budge will discuss speculative climate fiction from a West African perspective.
24 April, 6:30-8:30pm, Iniva
Join us for a free three-day colloquium Queer Black Performance at St John’s College, Oxford, Thursday 21 - Saturday 23 February 2019. This event brings together international scholars and interdisciplinary artists for three days to explore pasts, presents and futures of Queer Black Performance.
21-23rd February, Oxford University
The turbulent future that democratic elections anticipate all over the world seems rather bleak. The extreme right is capitalizing on the fear of permanently unstable conditions by making the other, the most vulnerable of us, responsible. Meanwhile, feminism and its intersections open the doors to alternative futures of dialogue with and respect for us all.
6th February, 6-8 PM, UCL
Listening Legacies of Queerness, Science Fiction and Writing Gender: a reading group with Ama Josephine Budge and guest author Sara Saab
Listening Legacies of Queerness, Science Fiction and Writing Gender is the second installation of a series hosted by b.Dewitt gallery with guest program curator Ama Josephine Budge expanding on themes explored by artist Gray Wielebinski’s in their first UK solo show “Shaved in Opposite Directions”...
1st February, 6-8:30 PM
An evening of irreverent performance, conversation and cocktails where we’ll rethink the boundaries we perceive between human and non-human, or between races, genders or classes. Listen to, breathe, taste and incite alternative Black queer liberations with speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge. You will explore possible climate-changed futures via her speculative fabulation ‘A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home’.
15 March, 7-10pm, Wellcome Collection (ticketed)
I'll be offering radical reading and breathing as part of this innovative radical arts initiative and programme that provides space to connect our artists over the three years of funded projects with its heritage and enable them to celebrate their work, connect and collaborate with each other.
30-31st March, Walk the Plank, Salford, Greater Manchester (ticketed)
I'm delighted to be presenting at both the conference and Mile End Art Pavilion for CUNTemporary's April programme of events. This one-day international conference brings together artists, theorists and activists to cover topics ranging from non-human ethics to ecosexuality.
6 April, 2-9pm: Local Dialogues/Global Movements
13 April, 10.30am-7pm: International Conference
The Apocalypse Reading Room will be an on-site library from writer and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, who will also lead in-conversation events exploring alternatively gendered and ungendered worlds. Part of Free Words new Season: All the Ways that we could Grow.
In a culture that valorises busyness, productivity, pace and “progress”, stillness can be radical. Refusing, ignoring, omitting, not doing; sometimes the most political actions look like doing nothing at all. But who gets to not do? When and how is not doing a politicised, racialised, privileged, resistant or utopian act?
Birkbeck University, Oct 17th 2019.
I'm delighted to announce that I have been commissioned as one of four solo artists, to produce a new work for the Casco Art Institute Fall Exhibition Programme, in conjunction with Uitfeest in Utrecht, Netherlands from 14 Sept - 3 Nov, 2019. Other works will be presented by Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom and Mire Lee.