ALIA ALI IS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2025 JAMEEL FELLOWSHIP AT THE V&A, LONDON
Currently in residency at the V&A, London, Alia Ali is their current Jameel Fellow. 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 artifacts, she offers counter-narratives to appropriation, violence, and disregard, reframing nostalgic pasts and confronting dystopian presents to carve out radically imagined futures.