ARTISTS

Zainab Aliyu

Baxter St. Residency (2026)

A litany for past suns

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer and cultural workerliving in Brooklyn, NY.
Her work explores the cybernetic and temporal entanglements within societal dynamics to
understand how all sociotechnological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all
materially implicated through time. She draws upon her body as a corporeal archive and site of
ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculptures, videos, installations, virtual
environments, publications, archives, and social practice. Zai is a 2025–28 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow,
2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation.
Her work has been presented internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design
Week (Vienna, Austria), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), Film at Lincoln Center(New
York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), MillerICA
(Pittsburgh, PA), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has
been awarded residencies at Pioneer Works (New York, NY), MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA),
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (DeerIsle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São
Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.

A litany for past suns, a solo exhibition of works by 2025 BAXTER ST Resident, Zainab Aliyu. This presentation of refigured stereograph images examines the power dynamics inherent to prevailing archival practices, highlighting the role of technology in the silencing and misreading of lived experience, particularly within Black communal histories.
Aliyu’s works juxtapose photographs from herfamilial archive with those from her broader
community to create a selection of stereographic pairings, which will be presented alongside
printed matter, installation, text and sculpture. Historically tied to early photographic
documentation and colonial ways of seeing, stereoscopy is reworked here as a relational
form that links images across place, time and lineage ratherthan isolating them as data.
Works attend to empathic gaps in collective memory across generational experiences
marked by migration and forced displacement, and trace how systems that organize
knowledge are informed by colonial practices designed to classify and control. The
stereographic images require viewers to lean in and look closely, asking for a scale of
intimate attention that counters distant and extractive gazes.
This intimacy extends throughout the exhibition, where material forms and spatial gestures
reference the quiet interiors of family life shaped by what is remembered, what is lost and
what is no longer spoken. Within the installation, domestic objects and architectural cues
such as a rug, curtain rod, cupboard, gate fragments, and jewelry appearin subtle dislocation,
theirfamiliarfunctions undone. Checkered floor patterns suggestrooms thatrecall the tiled
surfaces of kitchens and bathrooms, as well as staged West African studio interiors.
Fragmented gates bearing Adinkra symbols, alongside a Yorùbá-inspired paired staff form,
frame access as something that is negotiated. Earth-toned materials mirrorthe red and blue
logic of the anaglyph images, extending stereoscopy into the gallery and asking viewers to
navigate memory by looking through, around, and between objects.

Aliyu worked with two bodies of images in parallel: hundreds of photographs scanned from
herlate grandmother’s home in Nigeria, and images shared by others through an open
invitation. Seeking resonances across these archives, she initially experimented with code to
organize and caption the images, only to find that these computational processes failed to
registertheir emotional and historical stakes. Machine-generated captions flattened context
and misread lived realities, exposing biases embedded in even the most purportedly neutral
systems and reproducing long-standing erasures in the visualrecord of Black life. These
failures are incorporated directly into Aliyu’s stereographs as traces of systems that sort
without seeing, underscoring the fiction of technological objectivity and pointing to the
colonial frameworks such systems inherit. Rejecting the authority of computational
interpretation, Aliyu turned instead to a slower, embodied method: printing each
photograph, laying them side by side on the studio floor, and forming each pair by hand.

Accompanying the images are speculative captions written from memory and oral history,
arranged alongside, and at times redacting, machine-generated captions. These texts
interfere with one another, not to correct the record, but to stage a conflict between ways of
knowing. This layered approach affirms that the porous nature of memory exceeds what
archives and algorithms can contain.

Positioned within a lineage of Black feminist archival critique, A litany for past suns draws on
the theoretical frameworks of scholars such as Safiya Noble, Tina Campt, and Saidiya
Hartman, who articulate the tensions between machine logic and ancestral memory. The
project’s full title, A litany for past suns labeled rituals / A starlit any and all possible futures,
is a bilateral anagram that mirrors the exhibition’s conceptual structure. Inspired by Nikki
Giovanni’s “A Litany for Peppe” (1970) and Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978), Aliyu
positions herlitany as both remembrance and call to action; it is an invitation for viewers to
transform shared histories into shared futures.