Alia Ali 

Alia Ali’s art is a tapestry of histories, identities, and futures. Born into a Yemeni-Bosnian-American heritage and having lived across multiple continents, her work navigates the intersections of culture, politics, and memory. Through photography, textile, installation, and immersive environments, Ali explores how textiles serve as vessels of identity, resistance, and transformation. 

One of Ali’s notable projects, “FLUX”, explores the complex histories of African wax prints, fabrics that embody colonial histories and global movements of culture and labor. These textiles, often associated with African identity, have been appropriated and commercialized, reflecting entangled legacies of colonization and globalization. Ali’s work interrogates these layers, showing how textiles can simultaneously unite and divide, physically and symbolically. These textiles carry stories that stretch horizontally across oceans and borders, and vertically through myth, religion, and cosmic symbolism. While they appear as dreamlike fabrics of celebration, they also reveal the shadows of colonialism, capitalism, and exploitation that shaped their existence.

In installations like “In Collective Rise”, she uses textile, light, and pattern to create immersive environments, inviting viewers to experience identity, memory, and nationhood beyond language.

What’s remarkable is how Ali’s artist website functions as an artwork itself. Visiting alia-ali.com is an experience in itself. It’s an interactive, carefully curated experience. Every project is presented with attention to rhythm, spacing, and flow, creating a sense of movement through her body of work. Users navigate through photo series, videos, and installations almost like walking through a gallery, noticing details, pauses, and transitions. The interface emphasizes texture, layering, and visual harmony, which reflects her use of textile and pattern in physical space. Even scrolling becomes a sensory temporal experience.