About Alya

Alya Hatta (b.1999 Selangor, Malaysia) is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Kuala Lumpur. She graduated from Goldsmiths University with the Neville Burston Award for Painting before completing the MA Painting Course at Royal College of Art in 2023.

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Drawing on personal and historical archives, the work Hatta makes explores her Southeast Asian identity, and portrays the colourful intimacies of the diasporic human condition. ​Community and ecology are key influences in Hatta’s work. The foundation of these crafted realities are framed by ecologies that bridge Southeast Asia and Europe, often including imagery of flora and fauna native to each location, attempting to collage together differing realities that create new definitions of the word ‘home’.

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Hatta's practice centres on an intensified daily diaristic process. Ongoing scrolls of drawings and writings are transferred onto canvas, forming layered backgrounds through which fragments of the diary emerge.

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The work draws on moments of family and community life, alongside symbols from her immediate ecology. Imagery is sourced from a combination of archival photographs and casually taken iPhone images shared online - one of the artist's primary modes of connection with family. Through layering, distortion, and accumulation, these ordinary moments, unaware of their own significance, shift over time, existing in an in-between space where past, present, and memory converge.