Elsewhere (2023-2024) - By Eman Ali
This work began as a form of escape. Much of what I create feels like stepping into another place, a space where the weight of reality softens, allowing me to make sense of the world around me while giving form to my internal thoughts and ideas. At the heart of this project, as with all of my work, lies a question about connection - how it feels in this fractured, post-pandemic moment, and how we relate to the natural world. Or perhaps, how we’ve drifted away from it.
In creating this work, I found myself drawn to the idea of Illyria - not as a specific historical location, but as a kind of elsewhere, a metaphorical landscape where abundance and fragility overlap, where memory clings to the edges of disappearance. For me, Illyria, became a way to think about the tenuousness of the places we inhabit and the stories, both real and imagined, that shape how we see them.
I’ve always been drawn to nature, particularly the ocean. But lately, I’ve been haunted by headlines about the world growing hotter, about places like my own home becoming uninhabitable in the not-so-distant future. The climate crisis is no longer some abstract fear; it’s here, pressing against the edges of everything. Illyria, in this context, felt like a warning - a look of what could be, or what we’ve already lost.
As I began working with AI, I wondered if this tool could help me hold the weight of these fears in a way that didn’t overwhelm. I wanted to approach the subject with gentleness, to create something poetic and searching.
Water became the central thread. A paradox of abundance and scarcity. It grounded the work in something elemental while opening it to the unearthly. The scenes that emerged felt like fragments of an imagined Illyria, neither entirely real nor completely unreal. The images are quiet, carrying a sense of reverence while maintaining a surreal quality. Here, water isn’t just a resource; it’s a symbol of our dependence and fragility. The tension between the organic and the artificial serves as a reminder of how easily the threads binding us to the earth can fray, even break.
This work is about curiosity and about the possibility of seeing the world anew. Collaborating with AI has become a way for me to welcome unpredictability, to let chance shape the process. It’s an extension of how I approach creativity itself: through play, through experimentation. There’s a parallel in this to nature itself: intentional but improvisational, persistent yet fragile. In turning the familiar into something strange, I discovered not just a reflection of loss, but a reminder of the beauty that’s still here and the need to hold on to it. Illyria isn’t a place; it’s a gesture, a way of holding onto what’s slipping away and imagining what might still last.
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Eman Ali is an Omani-Bahraini visual artist based between Bahrain, Oman and Kenya. Her multidisciplinary practice spans AI, photography, text, sculpture, sound, and installations, exploring the complex interplay between gender, religion, and socio-political ideologies in the Khaleeji culture. By using her practice as a means of social critique, observation, and investigation of the layered histories of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa, Ali ‘s work invites us to consider the untold stories of our society and reflect on the systems that shape our experiences.
