Alia Ali & Anastasia Samoylova

Photo London 2023
Booth E 7 & E 8

Alia Ali is launching three new series, BLUE NOTE, POPPY and sui, at Photo London as well as presenting new work from her series SLATE. For the very first time, Alia Ali will also exhibit sculptures from her Yemeni Futurist Archive.

Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist whose work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation.

Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif.

Ali is currently expanding her practice by drawing on stories from Yemen including the nostalgic past of Queen Belquis of Saba (also known as the Queen of Sheba). By investigating histories of the distant past, she addresses the realities of the dystopian present in order to carve out spaces for radically imagined possibilities for the future in what has evolved to be Yemeni Futurism.

Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in and between New Orleans, Paris and Jaipur and is the recipient of the prestigious ARTSY Vanguard Emerging Artist Award and is a NIKON Global Ambassador.

Anastasia Samoylova (1984) is an American artist who moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. By utilizing tools and strategies related to digital media and commercial photography, her work explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque.

Image Cities is an exhaustive and conscientious work, produced in various locations, on how photography and images are integrated into the urban environment. Anastasia Samoylova revamps the vision and language of documentary photography in a working process that she defines as artisanal. Her images express the ambivalence and contradictions of today’s urban landscape.

Her books FloodZone and Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova & Walker Evans were published by Steidl, her latest book Image Cities is out with Hatje Cantz. Her works have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art; Orlando Museum of Art; Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; The Print Center Philadelphia, the Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, C/O Berlin, Germany, and the KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, Spain, among others.

Anastasia Samoylova was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2022 and received the first KBr Photo Award by KBr Fundación