Elsewhere (2023-2024), Protea Futures (2025)


Elsewhere debuted at Investec Cape Town Art Fair in the SOLO/PLAYSCAPES section, curated by Céline Seror.

This year’s SOLO section, PLAYSCAPES: Shaping Worlds and Selves, explores the transformative power of play—how it shapes our understanding of ourselves, our histories, and the worlds we create. Selected from an international roster of galleries, Ali’s work embodies this theme through her bold experimentation and poetic inquiry into change, loss, and hope.

Elsewhere explores our connection with nature and considers how we may have drifted apart. I was drawn to Illyria, not as a real place, but as a metaphorical landscape, a feeling. Inspired by how Shakespeare imagined Illyria in ‘Twelfth Night’ as a place of mistaken identities and longing, a kind of beautiful nowhere. I use Illyria to reflect on the changing nature of our surroundings and the stories that shape them.

That’s what Elsewhere is for me, a space between reality and fiction, where things feel both distant and familiar, where the dream of abundance is already disappearing. Annual headlines warn that the Gulf region, where I live, may soon be uninhabitable under relentless heat. Illyria becomes a cautionary mirror, showing us what is and what we’ve already lost.

I began collaborating with AI to hold these overwhelming fears with a gentle, poetic touch. Water and fire emerged as central threads: water, with its paradox of abundance and scarcity, anchors the work in something elemental; fire, a force of both destruction and renewal, speaks to our burning hopes and inevitable transformation.

In my series Protea Futures (2025), created specifically for the Art Fair to deepen my connection with the land, I reimagine South Africa’s national flower, the protea - an ancient and otherwordly bloom named after the shape-shifting Greek god Proteus. I was so inspired by this flower not only for its strange beauty but for what is symbolizes - resilience and adaptablity in harsh, water-scarce lands. I present it as a luminous portal bridging the natural and the imagined.

The works in Elsewhere capture the now - a gesture of holding onto what slips away and dreaming of what might remain. It’s a personal, spiritual search for meaning in the midst of loss.