Jonelle Twum
Jonelle Twum (b. 1992, Sweden, lives and works in Malmö) is an artist working across the media of film, installation, sound, and text. Grounded in Black feminist thought, her practice explores migration, memory, collectivity, and the politics of absence. Through speculative narrative, silence, and abstraction, she engages with what is unseen or withheld. As the initiator of Black Archives Sweden, Twum approaches the archive as a generative site of loss, limitation, and reimagining. Some of her recent exhibitions have been held at Krognoshuset, Ställbergs Gruva, Botkyrka konsthall, and Malmö Konsthall.
Broadcasts from the International Idleness Union
2025
Installation, soundwork, 27 min 11 sec
Courtesy of the artist
Artist Jonelle Twum presents a spatial installation conceived as a speculative radio broadcast and a room for rest. The installation invites visitors to listen to speeches and texts by Black thinkers reflecting on idleness, anti-work, and recovery. The title of the work is borrowed from Kiluanji Kia Henda and Tiago Mena Abrantes’ poster series Work Won’t Fix It, extending their critical perspective on labor into a new context.
The work wants to offer a counterpoint to the demands of productivity and capital-driven efficiency. Here rest is presented as resistance – an act that holds both care and protest at once.