Elyas Alavi is a poet, curator and visual artist with a multidisciplinary practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, moving image, poetry and performance. His practice often examines the complex intersections of race, displacement, gender, religion, and sexuality accounting for hyper invisibilities and troubling received notions of culture and belonging. More specifically, my work complicates histories in the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region and thinks through the links between the globalized condition, settler colonialism and who is implicated in mobility and displacement of Black and Brown bodies.

Numerous Australian SME galleries, ARIs and biennales including Sydney Biennale, ACE, Hyphenated Biennale, TarraWarra Biennale, Griffith University, Granville Arts Centre, Next Wave, Nexus, POP, UTS have commissioned Alavi. He is a recipient of the Samstag research fellowship that enabled me to further my professional practice with in situ time in London. A turning point in my career alongside his recent move to Melbourne involves landing a two-year studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary, with a solo exhibition

Alavi has also published three critically acclaimed poetry books. Translations of his poems appear in World Literature Today and PARSE Journal. He is the co-founder of Gholghola Collective and a member of ELEVEN Collective.

Alavi graduated with a Master of Visual Arts from the University of South Australia in 2016 and in 2020 completed a Master of Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Arts, University of London.