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Alia Ali

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Alia Ali

Alia Ali is an artist whose practice is informed by Yemeni cultural heritage and shaped by a life lived through movement, displacement, and sustained research. Working in collaboration with Indigenous communities globally, her multimedia practice engages material traditions and shared systems through which knowledge circulates across place and time.

 

Grounded in the present while attentive to both ancestral memory and futurist thought, Ali’s work challenges the tendency to frame Indigenous cultures solely through the past. Instead, her practice considers how the deep histories carried through material, ritual, and language are essential to imagining futures—how looking further back enables us to see further forward.

 

Language forms a central foundation of Ali’s work, understood not only as verbal or written communication but as something embodied and lived. Across photography, textiles, sculpture, and installation, she engages cultural memory, lived histories, and lineage, while examining asymmetries of power and the ways knowledge is preserved, transmitted, and reimagined beyond dominant representational frameworks.

 

Alia Ali is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Global Nikon Ambassador. Her work is held in notable public collections around the world. Alia spends equal time between her studios in New Orleans, Marrakech and Jaipur.