Alia Ali

Alia Ali is a Yemen-Bosnian-US multimedia artist whose work explores cultural binaries and confronts conflicted notions surrounding gender, citizenship. colonization diaspora, migration and Yemeni Futurism
Working within a multitude of mediums, including 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. 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.

Education

Alia completed her elementary and middle school years years in Sana’a Yemen, until her and her family came to the United States in 1998, first to Hamtramck, Michigan, and then to Bloomington, Indiana.
In 2002 she was the recipient of the Shelby Davis scholarship at the United World College in Llantwit, Major, Wales.
Ali attended Wellesley College between 2004 and 2009 with a two year leave in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, where she was inspired to continue her degrees in International Political Studies and Human Rights as well as Studio Art. In 2018, she completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts.

Works

', 2018
', 2019-2021
', 2021-2022
', 2019-2021
, 2019
', 2024
, 2021
, 2022-2023
', 2023
, 2024
', 2024
', 2024
', 2025
', 2024-2025
INSTALLATIONS
', 2020-2022
', 2023
', 2022-2023
VIDEO
', 2020
, 2020