More Urgent Than The Determination of Dates…
04/24/20
by Zakkiyyah Najeebah
Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space was recommended to me years ago by curator LaKeisha Leek, and it’s since been a continuous point of reference for my thinking around intimacy, space, and the domestic. I've been making candid images of domestic scenes at my partner’s home, where I’ve been staying during quarantine. While contemplating the poetics of space, and visualizing what this means for me, I’ve also contemplated what it means to co-habitate with a partner under a pandemic. For the time being, I’ve found some pleasure in domesticity—aesthetically and emotionally. In these images, made with text, I’m attempting to articulate my internal and external responses to all of the uncertainty that lurks, while also locating moments of joy, sadness, humor, pleasure, and stillness.
Zakkiyyah Najeebah is a Chicago based visual artist and independent curator. Her work is most often initiated by personal and social histories related to family legacy, queerness, community making, intimacy, and Audre Lorde’s naming of “the erotic.” Her practice borrows from visual traditions such as social portraiture, candid photography, video assemblage, and vernacular found family sourced materials. Currently, her body of work prioritizes social relationships related to queerness, Black women’s identity formation, family, and the desire for connectedness.
Zakkiyyah is also the co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers), a collective driven project that prioritizes shared experiences and concerns by lens-based artists of the Black diaspora.
Zakkiyyah Najeebah worked on this piece with Christy LeMaster, the Quarantine Times Friday editor. Each week, Christy selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
