Fatima’s Letter

Alia Syed was born in Swansea, and lives between London and Glasgow. She has been making experimental films in Britain for over 30years. Her work has been shown extensively in cinemas and galleries around the world. Syed’s work interrogates the protean nature of self-narration: enfolding fact, fiction, present and past; how histories are made and unmade. Forth coming presentations for 2026 include Courtisane Film festival and a retrospective at Punto de Vista in Spain. In 2018 she exhibited in Delirium Equilibrium at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2019, Artist in Focus at Courtisane Film festival in Belgium. Her film Meta Incognita was shown at the Yale centre of British as part of ArtMigrating Worlds: The Art of the Moving Image in Britain and (Im)materialworlds Tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists’ moving image from Southeast Asia and UK (2022). In 2023 her seminal work Fatima’s Letter (1992) was shown at the Whitechapel gallery as part of ‘Life is more important than Art’. In 2025 her new body of work The Ring in the Fish was shown at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.