Look What I Found with Alia Ali

Join us for an exclusive opportunity to hear from Alia Ali, Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist and current Jameel Fellow at the V&A. Working across language, photography, sculpture, video and installation, Ali’s practice explores cultural binaries and confronts conflicted notions surrounding gender, politics, media, and citizenship.

Textile has been a constant in Ali’s work. She reflects on its universality — from birth to death, from the most intimate to the most public moments of our lives — and its capacity to both unite and divide us, physically and symbolically. Through immersive installations using light and pattern, Ali moves past the limits of language, offering expansive, sensory encounters with self, culture, and nation.

At the V&A East Storehouse, Ali is delving into the collection to pursue her ongoing research into Yemeni Futurism. Drawing on oral histories and overlooked artefacts, she offers counter-narratives to appropriation, violence, and disregard, reframing nostalgic pasts and confronting dystopian presents to carve out radically imagined futures.

Recent highlights of Ali’s international career include exhibitions at the 18th International Triennial of Textile in Łódź, Lagos Photo Biennial, a solo exhibition at Galerie Peter Sillem in Frankfurt, and Paris Photo 2025. Her work resides in the permanent collections of The British Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Princeton University, among others. She is also a NIKON Global Ambassador.

This event is part of our Look What I Found series, where artists share their encounters with the V&A collections and reveal the surprising, inspiring, and sometimes challenging objects they discover.