Tuesday November 18, 2025
Zalika Azim (b. 1990, Brooklyn, NY)
Ascension Device II (actions for earth… or some other oscillation… a haptic and sonic engagement… a breath… or an architecture for gathering between space and time), 2024. Timber, aluminum, polypropylene ropes, spoked wheels, and electric gear motors
Ascension Device II is currently on view at Driftwork curated by Essence Harden at Southern Guild Gallery in Los Angeles, CA from November 14, 2025 through January 10, 2026.
“Azim 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?” from the artist’s website.