“Motion is emotion. Everything gives off waves of energy, otherwise called frequencies. They are the very fiber of our being.“ Alia Ali

In her fourth solo exhibition with us, Alia Ali presents vibrant and energetic new work. Full-body portraits are more common in this exhibition, often appearing to be in motion, and the formats vary greatly. For the first time, Alia Ali also ventures into sculpture — her hand-carved works made of Lapis Lazuli re-imagine millennia-old artifacts from her home country Yemen and are part of her "Yemeni Futurism" project.

Alia Ali (Arabic: عاليه علي) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist whose work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation, Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif.

Ali is currently expanding her practice by drawing on stories from Yemen including the nostalgic past of Queen Belquis of Saba (also known as the Queen of Sheba). By investigating histories of the distant past, she addresses the realities of the dystopian present in order to carve out spaces for radically imagined possibilities for the future in what has evolved to be Yemeni Futurism.

Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in and between New Orleans, Paris and Jaipur and is the recipient of the prestigious ARTSY Vanguard Emerging Artist Award and is a NIKON Global Ambassador.