Sfeir-Semler Gallery is delighted to present Alia Farid’s first solo exhibition in our Hamburg spaces.
Alia Farid (b.1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Her work, mostly moving image and sculpture, is interested in the ways modernity reconfigures collectivity and ritual. Farid's work follows multiple strands of investigation, including research on the impact of oil extraction on the communities and environment along the eastern Arabian coast.
As part of this body of work, she has produced the film series Chibayish as well as a series of oversized water receptacles made of fiberglass reinforced polyester resin, a byproduct material derived from oil refinement. Expanding this inquiry further, Farid has created public art installations inspired by blue faience and protective amulets, reproducing ancient forms at monumental scale and in resin. She has also installed Palm Orchard, a grove of artificial palm trees on the terrace of the Whitney Museum of American Art for her participation at the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept. In Hamburg, Farid presents her largest exhibition to date of Elsewhere, an ongoing research project that maps Arab and South Asian migrations to Latin America and the Caribbean. The installation is accompanied by a new video work that features archive material from the original investigation.
Started in 2013, Elsewhere relies on long-term engagement with diasporic communities across the Caribbean. Farid gathers photographs and archival material that record architectural sites, personal histories and memories, compiling an extensive body of documentation that reflects the accumulation of identities and hybridized heritage of the Caribbean and Latin America. Drawing from this research, the artist uses salvaged blankets to create handwoven and embroidered works in collaboration with weavers in southern Iraq.
Developed in chapters, each iteration of the project expands on the artist’s growing archive. The first chapter focused on Puerto Rico and included eighteen large-scale embroidered textile works—a selection of which is presented in the show. These works depict storefronts and urban landscapes mapping diasporic Palestinian-owned businesses and gathering spaces. Pharmacies, restaurants, and shops are rendered in bright, colorful threads; mosques and churches recur frequently, as does the language of advertising and commerce, from food menus to slogans in Arabic passed down through generations.
The second chapter, completed in 2025, comprises eighteen woven works set in Havana, Cuba. Highlighting the relocation and settlement of Lebanese and Algerian diasporas on the island, as well as institutions emerging from connections between the two regions, the rugs depict sites such as Centro Cultural Cubano Arabe, Plaza al Immigrante Arabe, Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos, local businesses operated by descendants of first-generation immigrants, and excerpts of the magazine El Árabe.
The exhibition also presents Elsewhere’s most recent chapter based on research conducted in the Dominican Republic. Following a similar approach, the works feature press clippings from El Arabito newspaper, storefront facades such as Ferreteria Hache hardware store or Fayruz restaurant, and recipes of Levantine staples, such as Tabule (tabbouleh) and Kibe Crudo (kibbeh-nayyeh). Passed down through family lineages and gradually absorbed into Dominican food culture, these culinary elements reveal a deeper process of cultural integration, one in which their Arab origins have, in many cases, faded from collective awareness.
Throughout the work, the juxtaposition of architecture and both Arabic and Spanish scripts vividly conjures specific areas in cities such as San Juan or Santo Domingo, and highlights solidarities created by migrations within the Global South. Within the show, the embroidered works are densely installed hanging around the gallery, with several piled on the floor in the center of the space. The three chapters are exhibited without clear geographic grouping, emphasizing the project’s transnational dimension. Elsewhere traces lesser-known migratory trajectories often shaped by violent, yet frequently obscured episodes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Above all, the project functions as a form of social engagement: One that works closely with Arab communities in Latin America, while sustaining a cooperative of eighty weavers in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq. The work ultimately emerges through a collaborative process that involves storytelling, drawing, dyeing yarn, and embroidery.
Alia Farid (b.1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions in Copenhagen Contemporary and Glyptoteket, Copenhagen; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the Geneva Biennale Sculpture Garden, Whitney Biennial, Diriyah Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial 16, Sharjah Biennial 14, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2001 in MoMA PS1, Yokohama Triennale and Asia Pacific Triennial.
Alia Farid has a BFA from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas (San Juan), a MS in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program in MIT (Cambridge) and a MA in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents MACBA (Barcelona). In 2023 she received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award and in 2023-24 she was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.