‘A portrait of the culture’
Photographer explores the world through textiles
When traveling the world for her most recent project, photographer Alia Ali would spend several weeks with the communities she visited before taking any pictures.
And when she did take out her camera, it wasn’t focused on faces.
Ali wanted to approach different regions through their textiles, as a “portrait of the culture.” In the images taken for her series “BORDERLAND,” she covered her human subjects in layers of their traditional fabrics and designs.
Hiding people behind their textiles was done out of respect for the artisans and to avoid coming into their communities to “sensationalize” them, Ali says. It was also a way for Ali to remove “other-ness” for people looking at her pictures.
“I want people to look at the fabric and be totally engrossed in it, and not see it as ‘the other’; that actually this is also a fabric of their world, this is something to bring them closer to this culture,” Ali said.
“When you see it, either it’s a man, it’s a woman, it’s someone who has a different coloring or face, it’s like ‘Oh, I’ve seen it before.’ I wanted people to look at the fabric.
“And what does it matter what these people look like?” she continued. “What matters is the genius they’ve created and that they’ve defined themselves by it,
and to see them through their creativity, through their imagination, through the product of their culture and civilization, essentially.”
Ali’s “BORDERLAND,” which will be on exhibit until Nov. 9, is East of West gallery’s last show in its physical space. The gallery, which L.E. Brown opened in December, will close soon after as Brown moves back to Istanbul.
Brown has accepted a “dream job” there as the project manager for a new media arts company.
East of West will transition into a nonprofit organization, according to Brown, and she plans to curate pop-up exhibitions in places like Istanbul and London, as well as back in Santa Fe.
“It’s just a very exciting position, as I’ve always tried to work toward a gallery being a global venture,” she said.
She said “Borderland” is a great finale for East of West because of its goal of crossing literal and metaphorical borders, and bringing forth a “visual language” for viewers.
“I feel so lucky this is the note to say goodbye on,” said Brown. (Ali) is beyond talented.”
The Yemeni-BosnianAmerican photographer, based out of Los Angeles and Marrakech, Morocco, said the idea for her project began to form over 2015 and 2016. She was staying in New Orleans around the time of the last presidential primaries.
“I was seeing all of these hate messages, this sort of bigotry that was coming out,” Ali said in a recent interview, saying it triggered some of the same feelings she had when her family lived in the U.S. following Sept. 11.
“When you have a situation like that, one can either fall apart or feel completely frozen, and I think that’s what happened to me. I felt handicapped. I felt like I wanted to do something.”
She said she heard hateful rhetoric about Muslim and Arab people, as well as other minorities, particularly from now-President Donald Trump. She also cited negative commentary about Mexico and its citizens. Ali compared Mexico to Yemen, with both countries seen more for war or suffering rather than their beauty, including their architecture and textiles.
Over a nine-month period, Ali traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico; Uzbekistan; Indonesia; Kenya; to visit two tribes
in Northern Vietnam; Japan; and India.
In Uzbekistan, she came across masters of ikat, the practice of dyeing thread before it is weaved using a “resist” technique in which parts of the thread are taped to resist the dyes. Batik, a form of wax-resistant dyeing, is popular in areas of India and Indonesia, as well as West Africa, due to European colonization and trade routes. She observed the art of shibori, which she described as “an extremely advanced form of tie-dye,” while visiting Japan.
It was during her stops around the world that she photographed the anonymous covered subjects that she has named “-cludes,” which is a play on the words include and exclude, what those words mean, and how they relate to the idea of borderlands.
“It’s essentially creating this other world that is beyond the fabric or beyond the material and that we can’t access it, or perhaps can we?” she explained.
“Who is on what side of the fabric? Who is the one who has power? By some of the poses, there can be ones that certainly overpower the viewer and other ones which the viewer perhaps overpowers. I think it’s also in regard to size of how the photographs are. Who are the decisionmakers? Who are the includes, the people who decide, and who are the excludes, the people who are pushed out? Do we push people out because we are afraid of being excluded ourselves? Is it about ignorance? And by that, does that mean we’re actually excluded out of something bigger?”
The project initially started as “People of Pattern.” However, that changed into “BORDERLAND,” Ali said, as she realized that term related to all of the places she visited. For Ali, however, the title doesn’t just mean places that are physical borderlands.
“It’s cultural, it’s also religious, it’s gendered, and just that fabrics in and of themselves are borders that somehow unite us,” she said. “Some of them (the communities) are actually on borders, and some of them have been included by the borders, even if they’re far away, because they’re suddenly homogenized within a larger society, within a larger nation that they don’t necessarily relate to.” She noted areas that have been impacted by colonization or imperialism.
Aside from her artist’s statement, the exhibition has almost no written word throughout. The only indication of where Ali took each image is in the catalogue, where she’s included longitude and latitude coordinates. She said she wants viewers to be fully with the textiles when they look at the photographs.
For her, she said it isn’t about removing language from the exhibit’s equation, but rather proposing that the textiles are their own form of language. She compared textiles to documents; both start as blank slates. And while documents are covered with words and sentences, fabrics are covered in patterns and colors that also have meanings.
“I think that it’s something a bit more, in fact, superior to verbal language. It’s something that is felt, its something that’s seen, its touched.”