Alia Farid: A Sounding of the Earth

Alia Farid presents solo exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek. 

On October 2, 2025, the Glyptotek and Copenhagen Contemporary opened A Sounding of the Earth, the first exhibition in Denmark by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid (b. 1985). The exhibition is the largest solo presentation of her work in Scandinavia, exploring the terrain of the Arab Gulf region—a landscape shaped both by one of the world’s oldest civilizations and by modern forms of warfare, violence, and extraction.

A Sounding of the Earth marks the third and final chapter of Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond, a joint exhibition series by the Glyptotek and Copenhagen Contemporary that invites contemporary artists to revisit ancient cultural heritage and its significance today. The exhibition brings together new iterations of Farid’s long-term projects as well as new site-specific works created for this occasion.

In the exhibition, Farid explores how social structures and materials evolve under the rapidly changing ecological circumstances of the Arab Gulf. She combines handmade and industrial objects with ostensibly differing meanings to reflect the context her practice develops in—a region where modernity is laden by the same imperial forces that fragment and extract from it.

Alia Farid lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Her practice explores the ways material cultural heritage is interwoven with narratives of migration and extraction. Taking overlooked and omitted histories as a point of departure, Farid creates counter-narratives that defy the oversimplification and one-sidedness that often characterize Western and colonial representations of the Arab Gulf and the Caribbean. In the artist’s latest works, she traces how materials and forms change as they move from place to place, reflecting on their evolving meanings and their relation to society.

The oil industry and archaeology
Through large-scale sculptures and film, Farid reimagines the Arab Gulf’s material culture to explore its dual connection to ecological change and social identity. Simultaneously shaped by the modern oil industry and by archaeology, the Arab Gulf is home to many separate but interwoven histories. Farid’s exhibition points to the ways cultural heritage is subject to transmutation according to circumstance, exploring its revivals through rituals, practices, and material expressions. An example presented in the exhibition is an artificial palm orchard that alludes to a formerly existing date palm forest in southern Iraq—a forest razed during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Farid’s sculptures can thus be read as hosting multiple histories, spurring alternative understandings of heritage.

“Contemporary art makes us look at the world anew. With Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond, we introduce a new generation of artists with a critical eye on the cultural heritage of the Middle East. Here Alia Farid is a central figure, combining in-depth research with powerful artistic expression. Her works speak to the senses in a way news or academic analysis cannot. The encounter between the Glyptotek’s collections from the ancient world and Farid’s contemporary perspective generates a tension in which cultural heritage is challenged and reinterpreted,” says Marie Laurberg, director of Copenhagen Contemporary.

Reimagining cultural heritage
The exhibition is the third and last in the series Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond, presented by the Glyptotek and Copenhagen Contemporary. The series began in 2023 with the exhibition curtain call by Canadian-Iranian artist Abbas Akhavan, focusing on the migration of cultural heritage and the way artefacts, like people, can be forcibly displaced as victims of war, geopolitical conflict, and colonialism. In 2024, Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme presented The song is the call and the land is calling, highlighting the ways cultural heritage can serve as a basis for resistance and the right to identity and self-determination.

Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond concludes in 2025 with the first major solo exhibition in Denmark by Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid, whose work explores how landscapes are harnessed and reimagined by their communities, states, and corporations.

“At a time of global conflicts, climate crisis, and cultural polarisation, it is more important than ever to take an active and critical stance in relationship to our cultural heritage. We need to be open to new perspectives that can enhance our understanding of the past and the meaning it holds today. The interaction between the Glyptotek’s ancient collections and Copenhagen Contemporary’s focus on contemporary art has created a unique space for professional cross-fertilisation—and for works of art that possess historical depth as well as contemporary perspectives,” says Gertrud Hvidberg Hansen, director of the Glyptotek.

The artist
Alia Farid holds a BA in Visual Art from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, an MSc in Visual Studies from MIT, and an MA in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from MACBA in Barcelona. In 2023, she received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award and from 2023–2024 was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She has held solo exhibitions at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), Chisenhale Gallery (London), Kunsthalle Basel, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (Missouri), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), Portikus (Frankfurt am Main), and CAC Passerelle. Upcoming exhibitions include shows at Contemporary Art Museum Houston and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Copenhagen Contemporary
Refshalevej 173A
Copenhagen, 1432
Denmark

The Glyptotek
Dantes Plads 7
Copenhagen, 1556
Denmark