Zalika Azim is a New York based 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 movement, belonging, and possibility. Considering the relationship between space and memory, her recent time-based, sculptural, and discursive works notion towards questions that situate conceptual concerns. They ask: What impact does the process and history of migration have on the politics of black belonging, movement, desire, and liberation? What does it mean to 'arrive' (and for whom)? How can we work collectively to sustain blackness (and black aliveness)?

Azim’s work has been presented with institutions such as the New Wight Gallery, The Mistake Room, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Gagosian, Welancora Gallery, The International Center of Photography, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Her first solo exhibition, 'in case you should forget to sweep before sunset' was presented with Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York. She has participated in residencies at Pratt>FORWARD (2021), The McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2020), Shandaken Projects (2019), BRIC (2019), and Baxter St at The Camera Club of New York (2018). Azim served as co-curator for the inaugural exhibition Countermythologies at NXTHVN, a new national arts model and multidisciplinary incubator cultivating local communities.

She received a BFA in Photography & Imaging from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University, and a MFA in Photography from the University of California Los Angeles.

Azim was recently appointed as the 2023-2024 St. Elmo Arts Fellow, in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, and will be in residence starting this Fall.


contact: zalika.azim@gmail.com