“Zalika Azim’s poetic exploration of migration weaves together historical experience, living communities, and embodied memory to render kinetic sculptures that evoke deep emotion and connection.” – juror Alison Coplan, Chief Curator, Swiss Institute.

“Zalika Azim’s work foregrounds the sensory and psychoacoustic potential of exhibitions to open a generous space for collective reflection—insisting that time and history are felt. Her photography and sculpture—like the resonant thwack of a double dutch rope—are richly layered to activate memory and choreograph the viewer in a dynamic encounter through which complex histories are unraveled and mediated by embodied experience.” – juror Vic Brooks, Independent Curator. 

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 space between ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’) act as a constellation of ideologies that enliven 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?