Zalika Azim (b. 1990, Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with ancestral roots in Aiken, South Carolina and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Her conceptual practice explores the tensions between personal and collective narratives – both known and indecipherable – in order to explore black migration, movement, and belonging. With longstanding interests in the poetics of Black embodied knowledge, her work encompasses a variety of media, including photography, works on paper, sculpture, video, sound, and is rooted in archival research and experimental field work.
Considering the relationships between space, history, memory, and time – linear and otherwise – her recent works notions towards questions that situate conceptual concerns. They ask: Can the liminal/unseen experiences of migration (such as the spaces between ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’) act as a constellation of ideologies towards enlivening our imaginative possibilities? How does the process of movement impact the poetics of black belonging, desire, and liberation? How are topographic terrains informed by the unfolding histories of displacement, relocation, and fugitivity?
Azim has presented solo exhibitions at Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York (New York, NY) and Soho20 Gallery (New York, NY). Her work has been included in national group exhibitions, such as Prospect New Orleans P.6 (New Orleans, LA), The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), Island Gallery (New York, NY), MASS Gallery (Austin, TX), Center for Black Visual Culture (New York, NY), Various Small Fires (Los Angeles, CA), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Gagosian (New York, NY), Welancora Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MA), and The Dean Collection (Miami, FL). Residencies include Pioneer Works, EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Pratt>FORWARD, McColl Center, NXTHVN, BRIC, and Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York. In 2024, she was named the Deutsche Bank New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellow, and the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Interdisciplinary Work. Azim earned her BFA in Photography & Imaging and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University, and an MFA in Photography from the University of California Los Angeles.
As an educator, Azim utilizes photography and the archive as a foundation for critical dialogue, theoretical explorations, and as a platform for engaging interdisciplinarity as a preeminent condition of contemporary art. She leans into various forms of research and inquiry based learning in order to cultivate engaging environments where students are encouraged to utilize their personal lived realities as tools for contributing to local, national, and global discourses. She currently serves as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
contact: zalika.azim@gmail.com