AlIA ALI

Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Having traveled to sixty-seven countries, lived in and between seven, and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through photography, video, and installation. Her travels have led her to process the world through interactive experiences and the belief that the damage of translation and interpretation of written language has dis-served particular communities, resulting in the threat of their exclusion, rather than a means of understanding. Alia’s work reflects on the politics of contested notions of linguistics, identity, borders, universality, colonization, mental/physical confinement, and the inherent dualism that exists in each of them.

Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Le Monde, Vogue, and Hyperallergic. Alia has won numerous awards and has exhibited internationally at Galerie Peter Sillem in Frankfurt, Galerie Siniya 28 in Marrakech, Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, PhotoLondon, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the Lianzhou Photo Festival in China, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands, the Katzen Museum of Art in Washington DC, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Alia also serves on the board of Clockshop in Los Angeles, California.

FLUX

Textile unites and divides us, both physically and symbolically. While its functional purposes are evident, its indexical capacities are not. Textile constitutes a nexus in which politics, economics, and histories collide. In her series FLUX, artist Alia Ali draws the viewer’s attention to the textile as a document in which politics, economics and histories collide.

INDIGO

In Alia Alia’s series, INDIGO, the hue itself stands in as a reference for migrant stories of disorientation and reorientation. Indigo, a dark blue dye rendered from a tropical plant belonging to the pea family, was widely once widely cultivated and traded globally. It is now used in textiles across the world from Japan, the SAPA region on the borderland of Northern Vietnam, to China, Lao, and Oaxaca, Mexico. 

From the spectrum of colors, blue in particular is something that unites us, not only physically but also cosmically, we all life under the same blue sky.