About Alina Akbar
Alina Akbar is a Manchester based Visual Artist and Storyteller working across film, photography and spatial installation. Her practice is rooted in both personal and collective experience, often developed through conversation, collaboration, and being chronically online. She intuitively detangles the complexities of working-class representation and questions of diversity, amplified through a cinematic eye that captures raw reality intertwined with poetic narratives.
Akbar’s recent work expands beyond the screen into immersive environments, using spatial installation and sound to explore how stories are held, shared, and felt within physical space. Through layered audio, objects, and site-responsive interventions, she creates atmospheres that mirror lived experience. Blurring the boundaries between memory, myth, and everyday life. Her work bridges worlds that rarely meet, inviting audiences into her lived experience of class divide through street documentation and the archiving of cultural moments.
Her work has been shown at The Whitworth, Touchstones Rochdale, Harlesden High Street, Aviva Studios, and Victoria and Albert Museum Late. Her most recent film Pardesi Raga is a permanent part of the Manchester Museum South Asia Gallery, commissioned for its project space, and was also featured in the CIRCA Art Prize 2024, with screenings across London, Milan, and Berlin.