ALIA ALI

Alia Ali invites us to look beyond the subjective and embrace the multitude of perspectives that can exist simultaneously—past, present, and future.

Alia Ali (b. 1985) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist whose work explores cultural binaries and confronts conflicted notions surrounding gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Working between language, photography, sculpture, video, and installation, Alia’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern as their primary motif.

Textile, in particular, has been a constant in the artist’s practice. Her work broadens into immersive installations utilizing light and pattern to move past language and offer an expansive, experiential understanding of self, culture, and nation. Alia’s practice expands into discourses of Yemeni Futurism where she offers counter-narratives to appropriation, violence and disregard.

Alia Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College (Political Sciences and Studio Art), the California Institute of the Arts (Photography and Media), and is a NIKON Global Ambassador. Her work has integrated the permanent collections of The British Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (MoCP), New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), and Princeton University, among others. Her monument “al-Falak” was funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and now sits at the Arab American National Museum. Her work has been featured in publications including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest, and the Financial Times. Alia Ali’s works and lives in and between New Orleans, Paris, Marrakech and Jaipur. She is currently a Jameel Art Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.