Opening Reception: Blood Memories and Love in Excess
Zalika Azim, Still from Blood Memories (or a going to ground), 2023. Single-channel video, 17:07 minutes. Courtesy of the artist. D'Angelo Lovell Williams, Seeded, 2016. Archival inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist.
The Visual Arts Center invites you to celebrate the simultaneous opening of two exhibitions: Zalika Azim: Blood Memories (or a going to ground) and thematic group exhibition Love in Excess. Enjoy drinks provided by Saint Arnold Brewery, Topo Chico, smartwater, and Coca-Cola, browse a selection of hard-to-find DVDs and VHS tapes inspired by the VAC’s fall season at We Luv Video’s table, and pick up a book from the VAC’s fall reading list at the Alienated Majesty Books booth.
Zalika Azim: Blood Memories (or a going to ground) represents the artist’s first solo exhibition in Texas, featuring site-specific installations, works on paper, photography, sound, and live performance. The exhibition explores themes of belonging, focusing on the interstitial spaces between departure and arrival. Blood Memories marks the culmination of Azim’s 2023–24 St. Elmo Arts Residency at UT Austin, where she explored local histories of Austin’s freedmen towns and their ties to contemporary conditions of Black life in Central Texas and across the U.S.
VAC Curatorial Fellow Maysa Martins’s group exhibition Love in Excess reflects on the complexities of love, desire, and longing from perspectives of Black queerness and Black femininity. Inspired by Ophelia Marie’s ballad, “Love in Excess,” the exhibition considers how the act of intense longing can ignite an equally intense affect, so powerful it overflows its boundaries, spilling into the body, the divine, and the political. Artists include Gwladys Gambie, Lídia Lisboa, Ophelia Marie, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Tatiana Nascimento, Ode, Madelynn Poulson, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Ntozake Shange, Cauleen Smith, and D'Angelo Lovell Williams.
In-kind support provided by:
