Alia Hamaoui (b.1996) is an artist living and working in London, UK. Her work spans spatial configuration, sculpture and media that uses processes of (de)attiring/ (de)upholstering / (de)skinning / (un)adorning / (de)constructing.  

Interested in the materiality of attire as the negotiator between body and space, she merges forms and references that are posed as opposites- e.g the generic with the culturally specific, the past with present, the corporate with the arable- into allusions of architecture that speak to the pyscho-political realities of certain landscapes.  

Hamaoui often works with and alongside collectives practices, such as being a member of artist cooking collective, gobyfish collective. gobyfish use food as a medium to explore social and ecological and social entaglements and take the form of participatory happenings, workshops and a deconstruction of the dinner table experience. 

Hamaoui is currently studying an MFA at Goldsmiths University. She has exhibited widely in London, with recent shows including solo show Passing Pari-daiza at Soup Gallery (London, 2023) , group shows  Lattice of Space-Time, Indigo+Madder (London 2024) and The WANAWAL Forma HQ (London 2024). As well as internationally such as Backbone, curated by Studio Salasil, Carbon 12 Gallery (Dubai 2024), The Collective Laboratories, MUDAM, with gobyfish (Luxembourg 2023) and Accidentally on Purpose, Turnus Gallery x Collective Ending for Constellations (Warsaw 2024). 

For 3oubour, Alia will examine methods of deconstructing and inverting Fez’s leather industry, specifically utilising the biological and synthetic byproducts of the leather-making process, blurring the lines between industrial and artisanal labour.

“I am thinking about the relationship between baladi leather-making processes and processes of industrialism inside and outside of the medina. Using byproducts of the leather processes, such as the leather offcuts that are burnt in the industrial factory as fuel for kilns or the lime coated animal hair skinned from the leather, I want to consider how I can use them in ways that speak to perceptions of time that decouple time from productivity by using concepts of waiting or inverting time as a way to animate ‘wasted time’.”