Listening Session with the artist: Zalika Azim’s Resonance

Artist Zalika Azim hosts a listening session for her work, Resonance (2025), a sonic landscape exploring Black placemaking, movement, and migration through jazz improvisation.

Created while the artist was in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Resonance is the result of Azim’s invitation to three Omaha-based musicians to sonically respond to the question, “What might be generated through an individual and collective reimagining of space, history, and land ownership?” This question reflects Azim’s ongoing research on historical Freedmen’s towns and the erasure of former Black communities across the U.S. In their performance, drummer David Hawkins, bassist Dale Black, and pianist Salvador Becerra transform the spiritual weight of historical absence and memory into a resonant presence, connecting disparate perspectives, multiple timescales, and geographies.

This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition Zalika Azim: Blood Memories (or a going to ground) and is made possible with support from the Every Page Foundation.

Space is limited. RSVP is recommended.