Alia Farid: Talismans (Kupol LR 3303)
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
February 24 – June 21, 2025
Monday–Saturday, noon to 4:30 PM
In the exhibition Talismans (Kupol LR 3303), the artist Alia Farid (SMVisS ’08) presents a set of three newly commissioned works. Produced in close collaboration with the Kuwaiti manufacturer United Oil Projects, Farid uses the material Kupol LR 3303 to create large-scale, polyester resin panels that hang from the gallery ceiling. The panels are tinted a soft, greenish blue, reminiscent of water and plant life, against which photographic selections from Farid’s own family archive are reproduced alongside protective, talismanic graphics. Tracing her maternal lineage, Farid’s works display spiritual charts and snapshots of women shown among lands they love—tender images that speak to Farid’s continued interest in the exploration of time and the intersection of personal and political histories. Crafted from petroleum-based plastics—and thus freighted with the geopolitical and climate implications of this material’s manufacturing—Talismans (Kupol LR 3303) sets Farid’s ancestral stories against the backdrop of global events.
These as well as related works, are showing concurrently here in Cambridge and the United Arab Emirates in the Sharjah Biennial 16, to carry.
Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Endowment Fund for the Arts, which is supporting this exhibition.
About the artist:
Born in 1985 in Kuwait City, Alia Farid lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. She is a filmmaker and sculptor whose practice centers on lesser-known and obscured histories, including the ecological devastation of southern Iraq and the forced displacement of its people; stories of Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean; and the intersectional Palestinian–Puerto Rican solidarity movement. She has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in Missouri; Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland; Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the Bienal de São Paulo (2016); Gwangju Biennale (2018); Sharjah Biennial (2019); Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2001 at MoMA PS1 (2020); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2021–2022); Whitney Biennial (2022); and Sharjah Biennial (2025). Farid was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2023–2024.
