Nilam Ali
Places in the In-Between

sunflower seed husks (2024) | Bead curtain, photos, wooden stick wrapped with thread, marble, sunflower seed shells 

The red bead curtain was hanging at the door of Nilam Ali’s childhood room. It stands for a specific geography, where it is typically used in a domestic context: countries with warm climates, where it serves as a privacy screen when the doors are open. It is also an industrially manufactured product that was once made by hand from natural materials. Made from plastic beads hanging in a room in Berlin, it becomes a product of globalisation and migration.

Glued to its beads are fragments of family photographs of women Ali is related to – hands, legs, unrecognisable faces of her grandmothers, aunts, and her mother. It speaks about displacement and loss.

On the ground, mirroring the curtain’s shape, lie sunflower seed husks arranged in a pattern of flowers. Usually carelessly thrown on the floor, they become a homage to the migrants of Berlin and their children. Between them, cropped selfies of the artist herself are placed.

Nilam Ali (*1995) is an art student at the University of the Arts in Berlin and works with mixed media installations. Her art comes from her personal biography: She was born in Berlin, while her mother comes from Izmir in Turkey and migrated to Germany with her parents as a child in the 1970s. Her father was born in West Germany, and his mother’s family lives in the territory of the former GDR. Her grandfather’s ancestors on her mother’s side were forcibly resettled from Crete to Turkey in the 1920s after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They had come there generations earlier from Syrian areas.

She works mostly with textiles, paper, photography, and found readymade objects, from which she creates mixed media installations. In her art, she aims to evoke the idea of imaginary heirlooms. She wants people to connect emotionally with it, as it may remind them of objects they find in their grandparents’ or parents’ home. To achieve this, she takes inspiration from everyday life as well as craft (especially weaving and amateur craft). The motives she uses speak about memory, which means speaking about belonging – losing and finding it.

When creating a new work, she begins with an emotionally charged object. However, rather than being documentary, she aims to move beyond the specific, personal object and explore collective expressions that shift towards abstraction and imagination.