Exhibition Review: Alia Ali
Alia Ali, Blue Tides, LIBERTY Series, 2022
Written by Maxwell McKeon
Photo Edited by Tania Flores
Copyedited by Chloë Rain
Culture is preserved and displayed in the fabric we adorn on our skin. In her second solo exhibition Blue Note at the FotoRelevance Gallery, Alia Ali brings the viewer into the world of her family’s culture, constructed from ornate fabrics placed over concealed silhouettes. Each piece is complex, colorful, and decadent. Her work represents a love letter to her earliest memories of walking through the marketplaces in her mother’s home of Sana’a, Yemen. Tracing her fingers over the patterns of the textiles, feeling the importance of the merchant’s role in preserving their shared culture through pattern, pigment, and storytelling.
Ali creates her own marketplace for travelers to experience walking through, even while being enclosed within white gallery walls, incense burns, tea is being poured from brushed silver, and everyone is lounging atop layers of thick ornate patterns. These hidden figures become vessels for the textiles to fill with memories and consciousness, allowing for Ali to dictate each of their messages through the fabric mask she covers them in. Each sitter’s pose, color, pattern, and texture give them a complex identity layered in the stories that are collected in the fiber of their material. They are queens from unknown countries, noble women bound in cloth, proud, and striking, from the powerful clashing of colors on their skin.
Alia Ali, Pink Palms, LIBERTY Series, 2022
Traveling to more than 67 countries informed Ali about the changing nature of self, and the influence that different cultures have on creating an individual identity. Understanding that the clashing of culture and identities, displayed through pattern and fabric, is never seamless and there will always be folds, bends, and shadows. Ali shows the audience through her work that we can cover ourselves in any clothes we wish, but the cultural camouflage of those fabrics will never completely hide our true identities.
Alia Ali, MASAI MAMA, 2021
Perspective is complicated, filled with a collection of differentiating reference points. Exploring this concept in her LIBERTY series, Ali questions Liberty cotton and the deep ancestral roots of one of the finest cottons in the world. Tracing itself back hundreds of years to India, Liberty cotton required the utmost skill to weave, allowing generations of textile workers to pass on the knowledge of craftsmanship. Yet its history became diluted under British occupation, taking the once traditional fabric and redesigning its imagery, culminating in the trademarked name for the cotton “Liberty”.
Alia Ali, POMM, 2022
This overarching concept of origin is a primary focus for Ali, striving to remedy our fast-fashion world, and provide a common reference point through her pieces Blue Palms & Pink Tides. Both works were constructed by master artisans from Fabritual Studios in Jaipur, Rajasthan, using 100% cotton with manually block printed patterns. They are each powerful statements, every aspect of the 49-inch x 35- inch structures were meticulously considered, to create traditional art, just as textiles used to be. Alia Ali has created space for these wide-ranging ideas to be seen, acknowledged, and remembered; just as she did when she was a little girl, walking through the marketplace.
To view more of this exhibition visit here.
