Zalika Azim is a New York-based artist conceptualizing her practice through photography, installation, performance and sound. Azim’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Dean Collection, the International Center of Photography, Pfizer, SOHO20, 8th Floor Gallery, Diego Rivera Gallery and the Instituto Superior de Arte. Earlier this year, Azim presented her first solo exhibition entitled, 'in case you should forget to sweep before sunset', at The Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. Azim holds a BFA in Photography and Imaging from the Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis focused in Africana, Gender and Sexuality Studies from New York University.
Independently Azim has curated several exhibitions. She is currently a curatorial fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT, and will co-curate their inaugural exhibition this winter.
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Through engaging personal and collective narratives, my work extends from photography to investigate the ways in which memory, migration, and the black body are contextualized in relation to colonized landscapes. Stemming from my grandmother’s expansive documentation of her family’s journey to, and settlement in Brooklyn, New York, my practice utilizes the archive as a framework and material for furthering conceptual ideas concerning temporality and Black authorship. Having previously contemplated occurrences such as The Great Migration, alongside the importance of photography to Black history, memory and migration, in past projects such as the installation Memories Unspoken (2014), I consider the significance of black domestic spaces to the development of community and the exchange of histories that have been excluded from hierarchical dissemination. Previous considered locations included, the living room, the front porch, and the stoop, as a sites for communal gathering and exchange.