Alia Farid is a Kuwaiti–Puerto Rican artist whose practice spans installation, film, drawing, and writing. She often focuses on urban and industrial landscapes in the Arabian Gulf and Latin America, tracing how histories of extraction, migration, and planning are inscribed into everyday environments.
Farid’s works frequently begin with research into specific sites—water networks, oil infrastructure, abandoned leisure complexes, or informal housing. She translates this material into sculptural arrangements, architectural fragments, or choreographed images that highlight overlooked structures and the communities around them.
Materials in her installations can feel both provisional and monumental: pipes, tiles, textiles, and signage arranged to suggest partial architectures or interrupted public spaces. Color and pattern reference local design languages while also pointing to global circuits of commerce and media.
Film and video are central to her practice. Farid often collaborates with residents, performers, or musicians, building layered portraits of place that weave together archive, observation, and staging. Sound and voice help situate viewers within specific social and political contexts.
Moving between Kuwait City, San Juan, and other locations, Farid’s work maintains a double perspective, attentive to shared histories of colonialism, resource extraction, and state-building. Exhibitions at biennials and museums have brought increasing recognition to her nuanced mapping of these trans-regional connections.
Alia Farid is a Kuwaiti–Puerto Rican artist whose installations, films, and drawings explore how political histories and infrastructure shape urban and social landscapes in the Gulf and Latin America. Her work has been presented in international exhibitions and institutional shows.
Alia Farid is a Kuwaiti–Puerto Rican artist whose installations and films examine how infrastructure, planning, and political history shape everyday life in the Gulf and Latin America. Working across sculpture, architecture, and moving image, she maps overlooked connections between regions and histories.
