PAST COFFEE TALK

Walkthrough with Zainab Aliyu

Join us on February 21st from 2:30 – 4:00 PM for an intimate artist-led walkthrough of 2025 BAXTER ST Resident Zainab Aliyu’s solo exhibition, A litany for past suns, and hear behind-the-scenes details about the making of the work and the symbolism within her installation. Two separate walkthroughs will begin at 2:30 PM and 3:30 PM.

ABOUT ZAINAB ALIYU

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer and cultural worker living 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), Miller ICA (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 (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.