BL CK B X: Alia Syed in conversation with Inga Fraser

Alia Syed made her early 16mm films at the London Film-makers Co-operative in the mid-1980s, using the Co-op’s optical printer as a means to explore issues of identity and representation. Her work proposes an ongoing investigation of the nature and role of language in intercultural communication, with a focus on borders and boundaries, translation and the trans-cultured self. Her films draw from personal and historical realities in order to address the subjective relationship to gender, location, diaspora and colonialism.
Born in 1964 in Swansea, Wales, Alia Syed lives between London and Glasgow. Syed’s films have been shown at numerous institutions around the world including the Whitechapel Gallery (2017), Antwerp Art Weekend (2017); Tate Britain (2016), Tate Modern (2016); BBC Arts Online (2015), The Triangle Space: Chelsea College of Arts (2014), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (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). Syed’s films have also been the subject of several solo exhibitions at Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi. Syed was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2015.

Inga Fraser is a curator, writer and art historian based in London. Previously Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate, she is presently undertaking an AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral studentship with Tate and the Royal College of Art, researching artists’ engagement with film in Britain in the first half of the twentieth-century.