Bio:
Zakkiyyah Najeebah is Chicago based visual artist and independent curator. Her work is most often initiated by personal and social histories related to the family legacy, queerness, community making, intimacy, and Audre Lorde’s naming of “the erotic”. Her practice borrows from visual traditions such as social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, and found images. Her art has been included in numerous group exhibitions and several solo exhibitions. She has also curated exhibitions at spaces such as the Chicago Art Department and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She currently holds the 2019- 20 Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.
Zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective driven project that prioritizes shared experiences and concerns by lens-based artists of the Black diaspora.
Residency Statement/Area of curiosity:
- else·where/ˌelsˈ(h)wer/
- adverb
in, at, or to some other place or other places.
Source: Google.
- Mpho Matsipa quote… to paraphrase, “the future is not inevitably one thing that dominated in the recent past… the future could be something else…”
- Torkwase Dyson quote… “Driving for it to be more poetic”
- Dionne Brand ..“Sometimes, the narrative isn’t enough, we need other things…”
- Jack Whitten… “The sublime is spirit”
In response to lingering thoughts regarding visualizations of “elsewhere” and “something else” ( as they continuously appear in cultural texts, abstract artworks, the trajectory of jazz, and my own emotional states of being) – I’ve been thinking deeply about what it means to create work that reaches spaces beyond representation but into a space of “elsewhere” and “something else”. During my residency, I’ll be mapping my own visual, artistic, and written responses to the quotes shared above. My intention is that these quotes (which are also questions) might be actualized into a short video work OR amalgamation of abstracted/redacted images paired with poetic texts.
