Alia Farid

Hajj Terminal Rest Stop (or Desert Furniture)

Alia Farid was born in 1985 in Kuwait City, and is now based between there and San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has a BFA from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, San Juan, an MSc in visual studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and an MA in museum studies and critical theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents, MACBA, Barcelona. Using film and sculpture, her work gives visibility to less commonly recognized histories, often deliberately diminished by Western hegemony, most recently the devastation wrought on the environment in southern Iraq by extractive industries. Her work Migration of Forms, which traces the migration of Arab and South Asian groups to Latin America and the Caribbean, received the 2022 Creative Capital Award.

She has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAMSTL), Missouri, and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022); and Portikus, Frankfurt (2019). Group shows include the Whitney Biennial (2022); Asia Pacific Triennial (2021–22); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Sharjah Biennial and Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2001, MoMA PS1, New York (2019); Gwangju Biennale (2018); and São Paulo Biennial (2016).