Artist Profile
Alia Farid

Alia Farid (b. 1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Through a combination of mostly film and sculpture, her work gives visibility to lesser-known histories often deliberately erased. In 2019 she presented In Lieu of What Was at Portikus in Frankfurt. The exhibition was the first presentation of a group of works that probes the impact of extractive industries on the land and social fabric of southern Iraq and Kuwait. Concurrently, her work Migration of Forms, which received the 2022 Creative Capital Award, traces the eviction of Arab and South Asian groups to Latin America and the Caribbean. The upshot of this work is a growing tapestry and material archive that will be presented at Chisenhale Gallery in London in 2023.
Alia Farid has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan), a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents, MACBA (Barcelona). She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; and Portikus, Frankfurt. Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the 2022 Whitney Biennial; the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; the 12th Gwangju Biennale; Sharjah Biennial 14, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2001 at MoMA PS1; Yokohama Triennale 2020; and the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10). She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; Rivers Institute, New Orleans; Kadist, Paris; CAC Passerelle, Brest; and Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Featured Work
At the Time of the Ebb
2019, 15 min 39 sec, Iran

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation on the occasion of Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, under the curatorial platform of Claire Tancons, Look for Me All Around You.
100 nautical kilometres from the easternmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula on the Iranian island of Qeshm–– such is the stage for Farid’s film essay and meandering through the surviving festival traditions of an island seemingly cast out of time or, rather, living per a rhythm very much her own, attuned to ancient seasonal cycles. The work foregrounds a number of local residents, whose performances draw attention to their customs and traditions, material surroundings and natural environment, from a brightly decorated domestic interior to an expansive sea view overlooking the Arabian Gulf.
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