CLAREMONT, California — 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. Her new work is currently on virtual view at the Benton Museum at Pomona College, in Alia Ali: Project Series 53, curated by senior curator Rebecca McGrew with independent curator Hannah Grossman.
From her earliest works, Ali has confronted colonial histories, challenged viewers’ preconceived racial and gendered 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 to the moving image and contends with the war in her native Yemen, educating international viewers and engaging Yemenis globally in a radical act of imagination.
The Benton exhibition comprises four bodies of work: photo series FLUX (2019-2020) and حب // LOVE and the videos Conflict is More Profitable Than Peace (2019) and مهجر // Mahjar. FLUX focuses on the wax print, a dyeing technique, and the ways in which stylistic variations are traces of colonial, economic, and political histories of exchange. Ali’s statement on the work describes the textiles as “fabrics in flux” that evade categorization. “Who names them? Is it the entity who produces the cloth, or the entity who consumes it?” she asks.