Alia Syed

Alia Syed is an experimental film maker whose work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. She is interested in story telling: the protean nature of self-narration, enfolding fact and fiction, how histories are made and unmade, especially in relation to culture, diaspora and location.  

Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including, BBC Arts Online, Tigers an Dragons: India and Wales in Britain, Glynn Vivian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2012-13, 5th Moscow Biennale (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); XV Sydney Biennale (2006); Hayward Gallery, London (2005); Tate Britain, London (2003); Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, Scotland (2002); Iniva, London (2002); The New Art Gallery in Walsall (2002); and Tate Modern, London (2000), Reina Sophia Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid (2009), Courtisane Festival, Belgium (2019) WKV, Stuttgart (2019) and Yale Centre for British Art (2019). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi.

Alia’s Fatima’s Letter (1992) featured in the major exhibition,  Life is More Important than Art (2023) at Whitechapel Gallery, London. She was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2015 and the Paul Hamlyn Artists Award in 2020. Alia was the Artist in Focus at the Courtisane Festival in Belgium between 3 and 7 April 2019. In 2019 her work Meta Incognita: Missive II featured in the exhibition Migrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain at Yale Centre for British Art.