Zainab Aliyu

Zainab “Zai” Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist, designer and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (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 2023–24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow and former co-director of the School for Poetic Computation. Her work has been shown internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Vienna Design Week (Vienna, Austria), Film at Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Modern Art Library (New York, NY), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh, PA), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong, China), among others. She has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), The Luminary (St. Louis, MI), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), Aktuelle Architektur der Kulturimages (Murcia, Spain), and Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico), among others.