WarpPhoto Series
202212 Artworks

WARP (2021-2024) is a body of work that initiates a dialogue about migrants, or individuals hidden in plain sight. The series represents a simplification/evolution from earlier works by the artist (i.e., FLUX (2019-2021) and FLOW (2019-2021), in which several fabrics would be used to denote foreground and background. With WARP, Ali creates an entirely new world with a single fabric, warping the spatial effect to fuse before and after, or here and there, in sync with the migrant’s experience of being neither here nor there, or entering the multi-where.

Ali pursues the work of installation, but rather than wrapping the architectural corners of exhibition spaces to disrupt the sterile cube, here she creates a series of portals to another space. She responds to curator John Szarkowski’s famous question on the nature of a photograph: “[I]s it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?” with questions of her own.

In each of the images, a body is hidden in plain view; the migrants are transmuted into their new realities. Hidden in the center of a rectangle, where the geometry of the frame—upholstered in the same single fabric—gives way to the tumult of drapery and fold, there is an elaborate and intentional intersection of pattern and volume. Is this the collective violence of forced assimilation? Is this chaos in fact a representation of the individual experience of assimilation, and the complicity of the body politic in the experience of othering?

The portraits in this series hold space by radically activating a balance between the conceptual and decorative, through the use of patterns, geometry, and form. From frame to core, they cut open a window in the exhibition wall to allow us to see what could be, rather than what we have been told to see. They are an explosion of frequencies that push back against the space in which they engage with each other, and with the viewer.

Politic is a language and understanding of people. Textile defines a culture, it is textual how form warps pattern and the motif evolves, like language. The term terrorist, for example, has undergone a rapid linguistic evolution to become associated almost exclusively with people of color only since 2001. Before then, they were the IRA, the French Resistance, the American revolutionaries. The history of textile reveals similar disconnects, as wax became Dutch, or Indian wood block prints would become British under the label of Liberty. WARP uses optical illusion to reconsider the etymology of object, of personhood, of (inter)nationality, through the concentration of the motif, patterns of movement, ownership, visibility, and power.

The portraits, these -cludes occupy the space, framed by the room. Are they being framed, or are we, the viewers? Perhaps people who are perceived as being the least important are in fact the most vital, and we are no longer sure if we are inside or outside of the fabric.

WARP is a manifesto for migrants, a term that is layered, like fabric, like this series. “Migrant” may refer to strata, class, century, color, origin, economics and politics. Migrations—of humans, flora, fauna—are the work of millennia, whether stolen from our land or our land stolen from us, we are ousted or we are aspirational, we seek safety, opportunity, new horizons.

And then we arrive! Is the migrant invited to integrate, or forced to assimilate? In the United States, a non-US citizen who enters the country as an “alien”, and must undergo “naturalization” to become a citizen. Our accents, knowledge, traditions and ways of existence are no longer unique, they become the lowest-common-denominator of what it means to be “American”. The American dream or the nightmare of complicity. Collectively, US citizens perpetuate warped systems that contribute to the eradication of security, freedom of speech, and access to healthful conditions of existence—both domestically and internationally.

Shift happens. In WARP, sitters morph into their settings as migrants often do. We arrive in all our glory, with our beauties and complexities in tow: the languages we speak, the music our hearts beat to, the recipes we treasure. Within us a myriad of experiences, stories, ancestral knowledge of our histories, our traumas, and our hopeful potentiality.

WARP questions the immigrant’s existence, hypnotizing the viewer, raising questions of whether the subject is male or female, photograph or painting, portrait or landscape…A portal of otherness is also a diasporic space that carries the promise of empowerment; a radical space of imagination, the choice of integration and layered identities existing all at once. WARP does away with static binaries and invites the viewer into the multiple layers of the in-between.