Eman Ali’s multifaceted practice bridges tradition and innovation, blending photography, AI, text, installation, and sculpture to explore identity, culture, and environmental preservation. In her SOLO presentation with Hunna Art at the 2025 Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Ali presents Elsewhere, a poetic meditation on connection, memory, and the climate crisis, in which she reimagines South Africa’s iconic protea as a symbol of resilience.
Combining her own photographs with found images in a multilayered, collage-like approach, she creates AI-generated compositions that craft surreal, dreamlike scenes where the tactile and the technological converge. With water as a central motif, Ali’s work embraces play and experimentation to reflect the fluidity of identity and humanity’s fragile connection to nature. In this interview with The Art Momentum, Ali shares how unpredictability fuels her creative process and offers a profound perspective on the intersections of transformation, loss, and hope.
As an artist navigating between traditional and modern influences, what mediums and techniques allow you to negotiate or disrupt cultural boundaries in your creative process?
I think of mediums and techniques more as conduits for connection, which allows me to approach my work with a sense of openness and let the idea dictate how it wants to take shape. I mainly work with photography, AI, text, installation, and more recently sculpture, embracing a mixed-media approach. Lately, I’ve also been experimenting with painting in my studio, though it’s still in the early stages. Regardless of the medium, I’m interested in bridging the gap between what’s seen and what’s sensed, between traditional cultural narratives and the deeply personal.
Photography has always been a way for me to slow down and be present. It’s a medium that pushes me to step into spaces of vulnerability and confront the complexities of life. That’s why it’s so healing. AI feels like opening a door to the unknown, allowing me to create entire worlds from my imagination, straight from the comfort of my desk! What I find fascinating is this interplay between the tactile and the technological and how it disrupts cultural boundaries by challenging how we see and interpret them. I love exploring new ways to tell stories and believe it’s important to stay curious and open to fresh ideas and approaches. Trying new things keeps my creativity alive and helps me see the world in different ways.
Your work often challenges conventional ideas of identity and culture. How does the notion of play influence your approach to deconstructing these themes?
Play, for me, is about inviting a certain messiness into the process and embracing the unexpected, even the absurd. When you start with no expectations and trust your intuition, what I believe is the hand of God guiding you, you avoid the creative blocks or fears that can potentially hold you back from the very beginning. Curiosity is absolutely essential. It’s very liberating not having everything planned out and letting the work surprise you along the way.
As an overthinker by nature, play is a way to quiet the noise in my mind, freeing me from thoughts that might block my creativity. It opens up space for experimentation, for making mistakes, and for moments of wonder. I completely surrender and trust the process. This approach creates room for discovery, for stumbling onto truths that wouldn’t have surfaced through a more linear or deliberate approach. I genuinely believe this way of working brings me closer to the humanity in the themes I explore because identity, culture, all of it, is never fixed. It’s fluid, constantly in motion, and play reflects that.
In the work I’m showing for SOLO, unpredictability is central. I start with a mood or a feeling, gathering my own photographs and found images, which include textures and fragments, and I layer them into digital collages. Running these through AI feels like alchemy, tossing everything into the algorithmic pot and letting the machine surprise me. What comes out feels both familiar and strange, like catching glimpses of a hazy memory, something you think you recognize but can’t fully place. That elusive feeling is exactly what I’m after.
Working with AI is less about control and more about philosophical questioning. What does it mean for an image to be “mine” when it is shaped by a machine? I don’t approach it with the idea of handing over creativity to the machine, it’s more about engaging with its unpredictability, letting it disrupt and expand my process. The result feels like a collaboration, where control and randomness coexist, pushing the boundaries of what an image can be while still holding onto my vision.
Play, for me, is about inviting a certain messiness into the process and embracing the unexpected, even the absurd.
How will the recurring themes of identity, culture, and environmental preservation evolve in the work you present for SOLO, and what role does the South African context play in shaping your approach?
I’m approaching these themes with quiet urgency. Though I haven’t visited South Africa yet, it has inspired me to explore these ideas in new ways, resulting in a series of works created specifically for the art fair.
It began with a simple question: what is South Africa’s national flower? That led me to the protea—a strange, alien-looking species that feels both grounded and otherworldly. It’s ancient. One of the oldest flowering plants on Earth, dating back over 300 million years. That kind of longevity feels almost mystical, as though it carries the memory of a different time, a world unrecognizable from our own. It feels like it shouldn’t belong to the present.
In my research I read that “proteas are named for the Greek sea god Proteus, who could change his form at will. Indeed, there’s a protea in any unusual shape you can imagine.” This notion of transformation struck me, not just as a concept, but as a way to connect with the South African context and the themes of Elsewhere. The protea became a perfect metaphor for the adaptability and transformation I wanted to explore. Thriving in tough, water-scarce environments, it embodies resilience and survival in the face of adversity. It quickly became the anchor for this project, not just as a botanical subject but as a symbol of life’s persistence and ability to adapt.
In my work, I reimagine the protea with luminous, exaggerated forms that transform into something even more surreal and futuristic—a portal between the natural and the imagined. I created entirely new variations that exist in a liminal space where the boundaries between the organic and synthetic, the familiar and alien, begin to collapse. They feel like fossils of a future we’ve yet to live.
I’m drawn to how memory and imagination shape our understanding of place, turning the protea into a symbol of both history and speculation. How can we hold onto the past while imagining what comes next?
