Interview by Chloe Evans
Portrait by Myriam Boulos

Alia Farid’s work, as she puts it, is “a way to work through ideas.” Her solo show, Bneid Al Gar (“land of tar” in Arabic) opened this year at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, just outside of Oslo – an art centre situated on a peninsula with a fjord on one side and a sprawling sculpture park on the other. The show, which brings together four of her major works, is part of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, presented to an international artist making work deemed important and relevant to our time. The rows of vivid kilim tapestries that map narratives of Arab migration to Latin America and the Caribbean (Elsewhere, 2023), large sculptural water vessels reminiscent of public drinking fountains in the Arabian gulf (In Lieu of What Was, 2022), and intimate single-shot films (Chibayish, 2022-23) make it clear that although formally very different, her works all do something similar: each, in their own delicate way, reveals and interrogates those narratives overlooked by Western supremacy. Something erased or previously obscured is reactivated by moving it into a different form, creating spaces that trace the complexities of migration.

Chloe Evans For the last ten years I’ve worked legally representing people claiming asylum in the UK, and the backbone of this work is helping people translate their experiences of migration into a bureaucratic language. The reality is that the richness, layers and complexity of people’s lives, especially for those who have fled their homes, don’t really fit in bureaucratic systems, and governments use that to disbelieve people – to say that they are lying. You, by contrast, create beautiful new objects that can hold the multiple realities that make up human experience, rather than punish it. It feels like a far more honest space to hold these complexities. Why do you choose to use everyday objects to tell very human stories?

Alia Farid They are documents and materials I collect that take on a different format: transcribed conversations, recorded tapes, travel documents, ledgers, menus. The tapestries are a visual representation of these trajectories. Much of the complexities that you refer to, which cannot be represented in a bureaucratic system, are contained within these everyday objects. For example, there is a store in Río Piedras, originally called Myritza from New York and now known as Dimas, which was and continues to be an important store for Palestinians who arrive in Puerto Rico. The store would consign merchandise such as blankets and towels to those who had just arrived, often extended family or neighbours from the same village in Palestine, to sell door to door until they gained financial security. There is this important history contained within this store’s records, and within the objects that sustained this network of solidarity.

CE I have heard you speak about Ana Mendieta’s photographs and how she places herself in her work, often hidden or obscured but always there. Have you seen any unexpected traces of yourself in the exhibition?

AF A really important element of Ana Mendieta’s work was her body. I am also in my work, but not as explicitly. I am present in it through my relationship with the materials that I work with, which are representative of my environment. I think all work is collaborative. There is no such thing as work made alone, so I see traces of everyone who has touched my work in one way or another in the exhibition. With the vessels, I learn from people who are more skilled at mould-making than I am, for example. For me, art-making is an excuse to learn, and if you don’t restrict yourself to a specific medium, you’re always learning from a new material and how it behaves, and constantly shaping your relationship with this material.

CE You spoke about the experience of working with the weavers in Southern Iraq in your tapestry pieces. Is that an ongoing relationship?

AF Yes, it’s a long project and collaboration. For a while, I explored the possibility of working with different weaving studios, but this one [in Nasiriyah] I really like. I don’t know if you know how a pile carpet is made, but it’s very different – it’s a knotted carpet. A kilim is more everyday. With the izars, it feels to me that there is a correlation between writing, drawing and chain stitching since it combines flat weaving and chain stitching. It was during filming in Iraq in 2022 that I unexpectedly met with the weaving collective in Nasiriyah, and we were both equally excited about each other’s work. It continues to be a very fulfilling collaboration. My interest with textile as a medium has to do with how it relates to landscape, from the information contained in the materials of the tapestry. I’m referring to types of fibres, such as plants or wool, and dyes, natural or synthetic, and how these all convey the conditions of the context in which the tapestry was made. The master weaver in Nasiriyah has a collection of antique izars, and they look so different from the ones they make now. This has to do with the fact that in Iraq, there is a recent history of war and economic sanctions that have left the earth depleted, and so what once were abundant natural dyes from a diverse ecology are now substituted by synthetic dyes. This contrast in the tapestries those from a certain time and those that are made now record a changing landscape.

CE It’s an exchange, which is so different to much of the work I do in London, where the power structures are so ingrained in the legal sphere that stories take on a different weight.

AF You’re doing legal work, which is a lot more restrictive than making art. Art is the opposite of restrictive. And in this particular work, it’s about telling the stories, both real and emotional, just how they happened.

CE You can use a medium like tapestry as a connector because the structures are not so ingrained in the way that they are necessarily in language and translation. Some of your tapestries in the Elsewhere series are based on conversations that you had with the Palestinian community in Puerto Rico. How have those conversations translated or appeared in your work?

AF Yes, the information is relayed in many ways; through storytelling, writing and reciting poetry, sharing photos, making drawings, discussing what things look like, what they are supposed to look like, what they shouldn’t look like. Our coming-togethers are always a mess of activity. The conversations translate into form, colour, composition, sometimes in expected ways, sometimes not. It would take too long to write up a description of what is happening in each tapestry, since each one is the layering of different histories, conversations, archives, and personal approaches and relationships with the trajectory that each represents, not even only mine but also the weavers’. In this way, each tells a conversation made of many different memories and stories. .