Zalika Azim Artist Statement
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. Ongoing research concerning present-day migratory shifts have sparked my interest in the somatic entities of black movement. Looking towards Sun Ra’s consideration of Space, Rastafarianism’s utopian Zion, and historic events and myths concerning Black flight, in current projects, I regard utopian, speculative, and real-time sites that have entered into black esoteric discourse as inspiration for depicting the intangible elements of place. As a descendant of southern and caribbean migrants, I often consider in my practice, the many ways in which ancestral locations are often times learned of, and understood through the recollections of others. Through totemic juxtapositions, and self authored photo-text works that utilize printing-press techniques to make impressions onto landscape photographs, I offer and transmit visual codes such as the technological glitch. Employing irregular patterns as information, I explore the function of coded gestures as markers of protection. These markers extend from superstitions rooted in ancestral knowledges and southern sensibilities, that play on expectations of time, space, and narration. Through constructed non-linear accounts, I aim to present my work as a repository, one that projects and absorbs multiple occurrences simultaneously. These processes conjure the history of oral storytelling, floriography, and quilting, all which have contributed to the history, convening, and navigation of individuals connected to the African diaspora. In this, image and text in relationship to each other, is neither foreground nor background, but function as overlapping narratives that oscillate between fact and fiction.