Q&A: James Jordan Johnson, New Contemporaries Studio Residency at FormaHQ participant, on developing his new moving image work Brutus and more

We caught up with James Jordan Johnson to discuss his time on the residency and the development of his new moving image work, Brutus. James also reflects on the artists who inspire his practice, the challenges of making work today, and the importance of allowing your own sensibilities to develop in their own time.

James’ work is on view at FormaHQ, 17 – 19 September 2026.

During my time on the residency, I have been further developing a practice within film and video. I have been making a new moving image work called Brutus. It is a work consisting of still images taken in medium format which details personal and social events within South East London.

The work partly refers to my father who is a bare knuckle boxer and has his own YouTube channel where he talks about quite varying topics such as cot deaths, duppies, him standing in a hotel room for seven hours as a form of exercise.

But mostly the work and my interest in my father speaks to systemic experiences of negligence, housing precarity, ontological death and who gets to live and die within society. I am also interested in latency as a certain register of time.

I am inspired by the work of Donald Rodney and Beverley Buchanan for reasons that their work feels like a visual and energetic apparition, and that is something that interests me in my own work.

How absence and nothingness is simply relative, but what might the relativity of nothingness reveal about society and how we think of the metaphysical space within it.

I would say I am usually challenged by the need for explanation and the utilitarian processes that art seems to find itself in recently.

Always allow your own sensibilities to develop, in its own time.