Alia Ali (b. 1985, Austria) 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 strong belief that textile is significant to all of us, reminds us that we are born into it, we sleep in it, we eat on it, we define ourselves by it, we shield ourselves with it, and eventually, we die in it. While it unites us, it also divides us physically and symbolically. 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. Her research calls upon oral histories to reframe nostalgic pasts and to confront dystopian realities of the present in order to carve out spaces for radically imagined futures.
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.
*The artist does not consider herself to be an “American” and therefore uses the term “US" - a United Statian in America. She strongly believes that those who can call themselves "Americans" are those native to the Americas. The United States in America is not a continent, but rather a singular government that has carved out man-made borders and has been built on histories of genocide, forced slavery and the active erasure of entire cultures- near and far. To this day, we witness how these violences continue to exist within geographical, legal and economic structures of the nation.
