Stripes, Election Series

“In solidarity with the prisoners’ labor strike against modern day slavery in US prisons. “On Tuesday, America’s vast army of incarcerated men and women – at 2.3m of them they form by far the largest imprisoned population in the world – will brace itself for what has the potential to be the largest prison strike in US history.” “Nineteen days of peaceful protest are planned across the nation, organised largely by prisoners themselves…” “‘Fundamentally, it’s a human rights issue,’ the statement said. ‘Prisoners understand they are being treated as animals. Prisons in America are a war zone. Every day prisoners are harmed due to conditions of confinement. For some of us it’s as if we are already dead, so what do we have to lose?'”

Image by Alia Ali  who is a Yemeni-Bosnian-American multi-media artist. Having traveled to sixty-three countries, lived in seven and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through image and multi sensory mediums. Her extensive travels have led her to process the world through interactive experiences and the belief that the interpretation of verbal and written language has dis-served particular communities and presents more of a threat than a means of understanding. It is for this reason that Alia’s aesthetic interests stem from people, place, and the processes which unite and divide us, all at once. Her work reflects on the politics and poetics of contested notions surrounding the topics of identity, physical borders, universality, mental/physical spaces of confinement, and the inherent dualism that exists in everything. Her work blurs the lines between what we claim to be objective and subjective, illusion and reality, truth and interpretation. Alia explores cultures, conflicts and borders through the mediums of photography, textile and the processes of making each…”

-A.A.

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