Alia Ali: Threadlines

For her first solo exhibition in Ketchum, Alia Ali brings together works produced across a constellation of geographies. From Margilan, Uzbekistan and Jaipur, India to Dakar, Senegal, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Marrakech, Morocco, Paris, France, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Threadlines considers textile not simply as material, but as a carrier of memory, migration, labor, ritual, and exchange. Across photography, textile, and architectural intervention, patterns become quiet cartographies-maps of touch, texture, movement, and trade.

Though emerging from distinct places and material histories, the works converge here along an invisible map, where cloth becomes a language capable of crossing borders more fluidly than politics permits.

Rather than foregrounding division, the exhibition leads with poetics: the intimacy of the handmade, the movement of thread across generations, and the subtle ways visual languages survive circulation, appropriation, and time.

At Gilman Contemporary, these intersecting trajectories gather temporarily into a shared space. The gallery becomes a meeting point for materials, gestures, and histories drawn from multiple parts of the world — bound by a common impulse to create, adorn, remember, and belong.