CHICAGO- Across an iron-red desert, lilac dreams blossom and ancient voices swell and ebb with the sands. Songs and scripts of old dance electrified in its winds and constellations stretch across the opaque fabric of its sky.
During a time that is all but apocalyptic, Yemeni-Bosnian-US artist Alia Ali is looking to the future with a radical sense of hope. The photographer and filmmaker is pioneering the field of Yemeni Futurism with new work currently on virtual display in Alia Ali: Project Series 53, curated by Senior Curator Rebecca McGrew with Independent Curator Hannah Grossman at the Benton Museum at Pomona College. From its earliest instances, Ali’s practice has confronted colonial histories and legacies, challenged viewers’ preconceived biases, and put pressure on borders both physical and conceptual. Her new work follows the same anti-imperialist threads as she shifts from the still image to the moving image and contends with the war in her native Yemen, both educating international viewers and engaging Yemenis globally in a radical act of imagination.
The presentation at the Benton Museum will be live until May 30, 2021, and includes four bodies of work by the prolific artist. The series of photographs in FLUX (2019-2020) features figures with fabric fully furled around them, forming the backdrops behind them, and upholstering the frames containing these pictures -sourced from Cote d’Ivoire. Textile in all its forms has always been central to Ali’s practice, but in this series in particular, she hones in on the wax print. Variations of pattern, style, and even execution of technique are in fact traces of colonial, economic, and political histories of exchange. In other words, these are “fabrics in flux” and evade categorization and even naming -are they “Indian, Chinese, Javanese, Dutch or West African?” Ali’s research into international networks of commerce in which the wax print was and is imbricated resulted in the FLUX series, in which meanings, values, intentions, and identities are constantly shifting.
Moving beyond -but also, through- her photographic oeuvre, Ali presents two new video works at the Benton: Conflict is More Profitable Than Peace (2019) and Mahjar (2020), the latter of which is presented as a two-channel film within The Red Star installation, an architectural intervention within the museum.