ISSSS ME

Wa’um bbyluvs. My name is Aliyah. I’m a curator, writer and filmmaker whose work focuses on decolonial approaches to history and the present day. I curate exhibitions, produce events, festivals, creative strategies, consult on campaigns/projects as well as making films and writing poetry, scripts and shit captions. I also facilitate and public speak, basically if I enjoy it I do it.

I’m London based and freelance, currently I work freelance for a plethora of clients and different organisations, artists, individuals and so on.

In 2021 I produced D&AD Shift with Google development programme with partners adidas, penguin & Virtue. I also released a new short film Loving, exploring the perspectives of 5 womxn learning to love in their twenties.

In 2017 I co-curated the internationally acclaimed exhibition ‘The Past is Now’ (2017-18) at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, ‘This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things X’ at Eastside Projects (2018) and Bald Black Girls (2019) in addition to various exhibitions across Birmingham and London. In 2020 I’m curating an exhibition for Ort Gallery with Artist Olivia Twist on platonic intimacy and house shares.

My writing has been published in SAQI Books Anthology: The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write as edited by Sabrina Mahfouz and in 2018 I was chosen to feature as 1 of Emma Press’ Once Upon a Time in Birmingham: Women who Dared to Dream by Louise Palfreyman.

It’s important to me that love and care are at the centre of my practice, so we can envision and awake new possibilities for ourselves and others, I believe that’s where the true innovation lives. This sometimes means hard conversations are had but having them enriches the work and understanding further. I will always speak my mind as I have no business speaking everyone else’s minds :)