The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home

On view from November 2, 2024 - February 2, 2025 

Prospect New Orleans 6, New Orleans, LA 

About the Exhibition 

Founded in 2007, Prospect New Orleans is a citywide triennial exhibition of contemporary art featuring artists from Louisiana and around the globe. For the sixth iteration of Prospect, co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson highlight New Orleans’s role as a city situated in the future, where questions around survival, continuance, and joy are being asked in advance of other places. New Orleans is positioned as a city that reflects “the global majority,” a term used to describe the near eighty percent of the global population comprised of Indigenous, African, Asian, Latin American, and mixed-heritage peoples. The exhibition’s fifty-one artists, presented across twenty-plus venues, honor this city’s history and offer opportunities for shared contemplation, discovery, and a reimagining of possibilities.

A harbinger can be foreboding. The origins of this word, however, point towards a host, a harbor, or a scout who makes a safe space for others. Prospect.6 looks to New Orleans as a signal of the future, in conversation with regions of the world that have long experienced the effects of climate change, labor migration, and histories of colonialism. Together these places offer sanctuaries and indicators of the yearnings and tensions that will define our collective future.

For P.6, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn has created a two-channel film made in collaboration with musician Thảo Nguyễn and New Orleans-based producer and director Marion Hoàng Ngọc Hill. This film features performances by Vietnamese and Black community members from New Orleans East and New Orleans’s West Bank. Nguyễn’s manipulation of the film’s soundscape is inspired by twentieth century movie houses in Vietnam that featured dubbed Western films.

About The Artist

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. Considering the relationship between space and memory, her recent time-based works notion towards questions that situate conceptual concerns. They ask: What impact does the process (and histories) of migration have on the politics of black belonging, movement, desire, and liberation? How might the spaces between 'departure' and 'arrival' act as a constellation of ideologies related to possibility?; What does it mean to 'arrive' (and for whom)?

Azim has presented solo exhibitions at Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York (New York, NY) and Soho20 Gallery (New York, NY). Her work has been included in national group exhibitions, including Island Gallery (New York, NY), MASS Gallery (Austin, TX), Various Small Fires (Los Angeles, CA), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), Gagosian (New York, NY), Welancora Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MA), and The Dean Collection. Azim completed residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Pratt>FORWARD, McColl Center, NXTHVN, BRIC, and Baxter Street at The Camera Club of New York. She earned her BFA in Photography & Imaging and a BA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University, and an MFA in Photography from the University of California Los Angeles.

She was recently named the 2024 Deutsche Bank New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellow, and the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Interdisciplinary Work.

As an educator, Azim utilizes photography and the archive as a foundation for critical dialogue, theoretical explorations, and as a platform for engaging interdisciplinarity as a preeminent condition of contemporary art. She leans into various forms of research and inquiry based learning in order to cultivate engaging environments where students are encouraged to utilize their personal lived realities as tools for contributing to local, national, and global discourses. In 2024, she will serve as Adjunct Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.