Refracted Futures

Alia Ali produced a limited edition artwork, Refracted Futures, to benefit Clockshop’s educational, curatorial, and public programs. Ali’s work explores cultures at geographic crossroads and considers how politics, economics, and histories collide and intersect.

Refracted Futures is a limited-edition photographic series that pushes against the singularity of how we reference the future. It examines levels of concealment by staging portraits of individuals enveloped in Mylar, a material used to make emergency blankets distributed to migrants. It was originally developed by space agencies as thermal insulation for space crafts. The image is printed directly on Mirropane Glass, a brand of one-way security glass most commonly used in interrogation rooms. Various forms of light are reflected onto the Mylar material creating a distorted constellation of imagery, allowing the light to refract into multiple layers, pointing to a heightened dimensionality that embraces a kaleidoscope of perspectives. This limited edition project includes a poem by writer André Naffis-Sahely.

Purchase the limited edition and support Clockshop.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Alia Ali
(Arabic: علي عاليه) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Having traveled to 67 countries, lived in and between seven, and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through photography, video, and installation. Her travels have led her to process the world through interactive experiences and the belief that the damage of translation and interpretation of written language has dis-served particular communities, resulting in the threat of their exclusion, rather than a means of understanding. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Le Monde, Vogue, and Hyperallergic. Alia has won numerous awards and has exhibited internationally at Galerie Peter Sillem in Frankfurt, Galerie Siniya 28 in Marrakech, Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, PhotoLondon, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the Lianzhou Photo Festival in China, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands, the Katzen Museum of Art in Washington DC, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Alia also serves on the board of Youth of the World Together (YWT) in Sana’a, Yemen, and Clockshop in Los Angeles, California. Alia’s work is in collections at Princeton University, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the British Museum, and numerous international private collections.