Alia Gargum - I Forget My Words

About

Alia Gargum is a sculpture and installation artist who composes her work through critical and personal exploration of politics and culture, focusing on her heritage through diasporic means. Metalwork, fabric and installation elements are reorganised, reused and transformed in an organic manner as part of the artistic process.

Alia primarily uses hand-treated steel and adopted materials to depict signifiers of her past through a contemporary lens. Alia's work explores power dynamics that echo into personal relationships, with a focus on the history of North African region power structures. Themes of forced migration, exile and identity also converge in her works.

Alia was recently selected as part of New Contemporaries 2026, exhibiting at South London Gallery and the Middlesbrough Institution of Modern Art. She also was awarded a Henry Moore Foundation Winter Grant in 2025 to produce a public sculpture which was unveiled this year as part of a community Micro-Farm in Middlesbrough city centre at The Auxiliary Project Space and featured at Middlesbrough Art Week 2026.

This solo exhibition is a continuation of Alia's exploration into exile, identity and power, rooted in her experience as a Libyan-British artist forcibly displaced from Libya in childhood. Decades on, the lasting presence of both oppression and a complex nostalgia for home continues to inform her research and artistic practice, with a focus on the duality of both language and nationality. Reclaimed wood from church pews, fabric and metalwork convene to invite a discussion on identity and memory.

Open Thursdays and Fridays 9:30am - 3:30pm until Friday 11th December
@alia_studio_ | www.aliagargum.co.uk