For Photo Basel, we're delighted to present a two-person booth showing works by Russian-American artist Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) and Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist Alia Ali (b. 1985). While Anastasia Samoylova explores life on the climatic knife-edge and interrogates notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque, Alia Ali’s new body of work engages in a global dialogue, highlighting patterns of trauma, erasure, and reconstructed identities experienced by numerous nations and diasporic communities across the globe.
Alia Ali // عاليه علي is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Having traveled to sixty-seven countries, lived in and between seven, and grown up among five languages, her most comfortable mode of communication is through photography, video, and installation.
Alia Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institiute of the Arts. Her work has been featured in the Financial Times, Le Monde, Vogue, and Hyperallergic. Alia has won numerous awards and has exhibited internationally. Her work is in collections at the British Museum, Princeton University, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and numerous international private collections.
Alia Ali lives and works in Los Angeles and Marrakech, and is currently in residency at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico.
Anastasia Samoylova: Pool After Hurricane, FloodZone series, 2017. Archival Pigment Print, mounted, framed, 102 x 82 cm Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Anastasia Samoylova: Six Real Matterhorns, Landscape Sublime series, 2019. Archival Pigment Print, mounted, framed, 102 x 82 cm Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984, Moscow; lives in Miami and New York City) moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. In 2020 she had her first solo museum exhibition of ongoing project FloodZone at USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. Anastasia Samoylova was awarded a number of grants for FloodZone, in Europe her work has been presented at the Kunsthaus Wien, as well as Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Kunsthalle Mannheim, and the Musée des beaux-arts in Le Locle, Switzerland.
Anastasia is a graduate of the Russian State University and received her MFA from Bradley University. She has published with The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, FOAM, Wired, Art Press, and others. In 2019, Steidl published her book FloodZone to great acclaim. Anastasia has lectured as an invited artist at George Eastman Museum, Paris Photo, SVA New York, among others. Her work is in the collections at the Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Art Slant Collection, Paris, and Vontobel Art Collection, Zurich.
Paul Cupido was born in 1977 on the small Dutch island of Terschelling. The inhabitants lived for the most part from what nature had to offer: from local food sources and the things that were washed ashore. The islanders' deep bond with nature and a life strongly affected by the rhythm of the seasons, the phases of the moon and the tides also characterize Cupido's artistic work to this day. He is convinced that people's lived existence is closely interwoven with nature. Paul Cupido's photographic explorations led him to Japan shortly after graduating from the Academy of Photography and later to the tropical zones of the Brazilian Amazon. But every investigation of a place by means of photography is for Cupido also a spiritual journey into his inner self. His mesmerizing image sequences seem to have been created at the transitional moment between day and night, in a zone without time and geographical placement, but full of magic, melancholic beauty and poetic power.
BILDHALLE present Ilona Langbroek’s personal series “Silent Loss”, which is based on her family’s history in the former Dutch East Indies. The Netherlands has a long history with the Dutch East Indies, which leave all kinds of traces that are reminiscent of the vast but also complex colonial past between these two countries. In fact, her work is about the lost identity of the large number of people who were forced to leave their country after the Independence and their emotions regarding this loss which are dormant but still very much alive. Langbroek shoots purely intuitively based upon her memories of her grandmother: how she looked, her accent and tone of her voice. In addition, research is an important part of the work to find inspiration. By studying books, interviewing people from previous generations and scrutinizing old photo albums, Lang¬broek gets closer to the life of her grandparents in the Dutch East Indies. Furthermore, her ideas are re¬fined and elaborated in detail, in search of the right items, models, locations and clothing which are partly original antiques but were also specifically handmade based on her own ideas and designs.
Jessica Backhaus (*1970, Cuxhaven, Germany) is considered one of the most important voices in contemporary photography out of Germany. Her work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows, e.g. at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin and MARTA Herford. In 2013, the Kunsthalle in Erfurt dedicated a large-scale museum exhibition to Jessica Backhaus. Jessica Backhaus’ works also have their permanent place in important collections, e.g. the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Margulies Collection, Miami, the Art Collection of the Taunus Sparkasse, Bad Homburg, the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Frankfurt and the ING Art Collection, Brussels. Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, has published eight monographs so far.
