Saturday, 15 Nov, 10:30 am for 11 am
747 N Western Ave, Melrose Hill, Los Angeles

Moderator: Evan Nicole Brown (writer)
Panelists: Essence Harden (curator), Sidony O’Neal (artist), Zalika Azim (artist), Nneka Jackson (writer, cultural strategist)

Rooted in the poetics of remnant, trace, and apparition, this conversation in the gallery will reflect on Black diasporic memory, embodied ritual, and the speculative space between material and psychic presence. The discussion centers on Black materiality, memory, and knowledge production, exploring how fragments and residues hold the potential to reveal new ways of understanding history, belonging, and creation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Essence Harden is the curator of Expo Chicago 2026, co-curator of Made in LA 2025 at The Hammer Museum and Curator of the Focus section for Frieze LA, 2024 through 2026. She has curated exhibitions at the California African American Museum (CAAM), The Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Art + Practice, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and Oakland Museum of California, amongst others. Harden has consistently engaged with Southern Guild’s programme since the Los Angeles gallery opened in February 2024, as a moderator, panelist and advisor.

Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor and journalist who covers arts and culture. Her work has appeared in Architectural Digest, Cultured, The Cut, Getty Magazine, L.A. Times Image, The New York Times, T Magazine and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and the founder of Group Chat, a conversation series and creative salon in LA.

Sidony O’Neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research in the philosophy of pre-to-post machine computation and cultures of taste. O’Neal’s practice especially treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped many relationships through objects, labour and technology over time. Recent solo exhibitions include Softmax Hard Hasp (2024) at Et al., San Francisco; The Pudding Butcher (2023) at Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University; and Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort (2022) at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland.

Zalika Azim is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with ancestral roots in Aiken, South Carolina and Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Her practice explores the tensions between personal and collective narratives – both known and indecipherable – in order to explore black migration, movement, and belonging. With longstanding interests in the poetics of Black embodied knowledge, her work encompasses a variety of media, including photography, works on paper, sculpture, video, sound, and is rooted in archival research and experimental field work.

Nneka Jackson is a writer, cultural development strategist and attorney with a focus on intellectual property, creative economies and cultural equity. She works with creators, organisations, and ecosystems to cultivate sustainable growth. As a writer, Jackson explores diasporic memory, identity, folklore and radical possibility.