Alia Syed

Since the 1980s, Alia Syed has been making films that draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism. Her work resists the linearity of the film strip and of traditional narrative structures, using layering and repetition — enfolding fact, fiction, present and past.

Her early 16mm shorts were made at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative of the 1980s, under the influence of British Structural/Materialism and in the midst of a reinvigorating wave of feminist, avant-garde, essayistic work that had been inaugurated by Lis Rhodes’s Light Reading in 1978. Although Syed absorbed both these lineages within her work — for her they were neither contradictory or exclusive of one another — she’d also go on to use the Co—op’s optical printer as a means to explore critical issues of identity and representation. A mixed-race British woman, of Welsh and Indian ancestry and Scottish upbringing, Syed was part of a generation for whom the personal was resolutely political, and her films often depart from a personal narrative in order to create confusion between individual and cultural memory. Syed is interested in how the different relationships between sound and image can open up the filmic space and in creating juxtapositions that relate to her own feelings of alienation.

Born in 1964 in Swansea, Alia Syed grew up in Glasgow and now lives in London. Her films have been shown at international institutions such as LACMA, the Moscow Biennale, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, INIVA, WKV Stuttgart and the Yale Centre for British Art. This retrospective is the first comprehensive survey of her work in Spain. It provides an overview of five decades of moving image practice, from early student films such as Unfolding —1986— and Fatima’s Letter —1992— to recent exhibition works such as Snow —2019— and The Dhabba —2025—. Structured in two parts, the first screening presents a selection of Alia Syed’s rich 16mm practice whilst a second session centres on a series of works from the last decade that reflect on the filmmaker’s Asian-Scottish upbringing. Syed will be present at the screenings, accompanied by fellow Scottish filmmaker Rebecca Jane Arthur, who has written about Syed’s films, to discuss her work. The screenings are curated by María Palacios Cruz, who organised previous retrospectives of Alia Syed’s films at the Courtisane Festival —2019— and Open City Documentary Festival —2021—, and edited the publication Alia Syed: Imprints, Documents, Fictions —2022—.

María Palacios Cruz