Opening Reception: Saturday, October 3, 6 – 8 pm
*During Art for Arts’ Sake

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Points of Passage, featuring new works by Alia Ali. After eighteen months of near-continuous movement, migration, travel, and research between London, India, Java, Morocco, Helsinki, and beyond, New Orleans artist Alia Ali returns home with a practice transformed. Fellowships, residencies, commissions, and a major solo exhibition at Taidehalli Helsinki have afforded Ali something increasingly rare: sustained time for research, experimentation, and making.

Points of Passage asks what happens to an artist’s language when travel and time allow that language to expand. Ali returns to New Orleans not simply with new work, but with greater fluency and a larger vocabulary. The exhibition brings together three interconnected bodies of work, Homage, Batik, and a new in situ iteration of Woven Air, alongside talismanic objects, textiles, stones, and writings gathered and created throughout Ali’s travels. Long recognized for her photographic sculptures and immersive textile installations, Ali increasingly moves beyond the photographic image. Textile, language, light, air, and movement become materials in their own right. Together, the works carry questions of migration, inheritance, protection, memory, and belonging into new material territory. Running throughout Points of Passage is Sabyani, Ali’s invented writing system. Drawing from ancient Sabaic, Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and historical textile ornamentation, Sabyani moves across cloth and object as both language and pattern. It exists somewhere between ancestral memory and an imagined future.

Homage (2026–27)
In Homage, textile becomes language. French velvets produced in the 1950s for Moroccan royal interiors, collected by Ali over seven years from markets across Morocco, are lined with Indian brocades and transformed into forms inspired by traditional Yemeni judges’ robes. Crescent and star forms connect Morocco and New Orleans while invoking older systems of celestial navigation, astronomy, astrology, faith, and time. Like Ali herself, these materials have traveled between geographies. The celestial becomes a compass for passage.

Batik (2025–26)
Batik traces the circulation of textile, knowledge, and belief across the Indian Ocean. Rooted in Ali’s childhood encounters with Indonesian batik and expanded through research and collaboration with master makers in Java, the series considers batik as a living language, carried through waxing, dyeing, repetition, touch, and generations of embodied knowledge. Ali follows its passage between Southeast Asia, India, East Africa, Yemen, and the wider Arabian Peninsula. Cloth becomes witness, carrying lineage and identity across oceans without surrendering where it comes from.

Woven Air (2026), in situ
First developed in Helsinki, a city shaped by water, extraordinary clarity of light, and the dramatic passage of seasons, Woven Air now returns with Ali to another city inseparable from water, New Orleans. Fourteen vertical textiles made from malmal, the legendary cotton muslin of Bengal once described as “woven air,” are hand-dyed in Jaipur and hand-painted by Ali with silver Sabyani markings. Suspended in space, the textiles respond to the particular light, air, and architecture of New Orleans. They shift between opacity and translucency, object and atmosphere. What emerged in Helsinki through an encounter with water, light, and seasonal change transforms again here, in a city where water carries its own histories of passage, survival, memory, and return.

Throughout the exhibition, talismanic forms emerge from objects, stones, crystals, textiles, and writings encountered and collected during Ali’s travels. They invoke an ancient human impulse to charge material with something beyond itself: protection, power, healing, memory, and the possibility of carrying something safely from one place to another.

After eighteen months of passage, Ali returns to New Orleans with a larger vocabulary. Points of Passage considers what happens to an artist’s language when it is given distance, research, movement, and time. These works are not a record of everywhere she has been. They reveal what has been gathered along the way.

Ali’s work is held in notable public collections around the world including the British Museum, Princeton University, New Orleans Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Photography in Chicago, Benton Museum of Art, and a myriad of international private collections. She is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a Global Nikon Ambassador, and the recipient of the ARTSY Vanguard Prize 2021-22. Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS).

Following her expansive solo presentation in Helsinki, Ali will continue this period of experimentation through an upcoming residency at The Momentary, part of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art ecosystem in Bentonville, Arkansas.