Galeri Sasha presents The Afterlife of Ordinary Things, a solo exhibition by Alya Hatta (b. 1999, Selangor, Malaysia), an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Kuala Lumpur. Hatta’s practice is shaped by an attentiveness to how images and surfaces accumulate over time—a sensibility informed by her daily commute through South London, where urban walls become time-based artworks marked by layering, erosion, and trace. This logic extends into her process: long, scroll-like drawings form the base of her work, from which images are cut, spliced, and stitched into dense, evolving compositions.
The works in this exhibition originate from a single moment: a family barbecue in Malaysia in December 2025. Candid photographs from the evening—fleeting, informal, and often humorous—are extracted and translated through drawing, collage, and paint. Removed from their original context, these fragments begin to shift. Like the urban surfaces that inform her practice, the paintings register time through repetition, removal, and layering. In this process, ordinary moments are extended beyond their original duration, acquiring an afterlife within the work.
At the centre of her process is an ongoing diaristic practice consisting of long scroll-like drawings filled with fragments of text, sketches, and observations that appear on the surface of her work. These scrolls operate as reservoirs of visual material. When transferred into painting, images are cut, spliced, and stitched together, creating surfaces that register the gradual layering of experience rather than the construction of a single fixed image.
In The Afterlife of Ordinary Things, Hatta proposes that the everyday does not disappear but undergoes a migration. Often incorporating flora and fauna native to Southeast Asia and Europe, her paintings collage together differing realities to construct hybrid visual environments shaped by memory, distance, and movement between places. Occupying an in-between space, they suggest that home is not fixed, but continuously assembled across multiple geographies.
Alya Hatta (b. 1999, Selangor, Malaysia) is an interdisciplinary artist based between London and Kuala Lumpur. Working across drawing, painting, and assemblage, her practice explores memory, community, and diasporic identity through layered, materially driven compositions. She graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, receiving the Neville Burston Award for Painting, and completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023. Most recently, she has been included in To Ebb Is To Flow, Friday Lates at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2026), and HSBC Beyond Emerging Artists, Saatchi Gallery, London (2025). Her recent solo exhibitions include A Soft Place To Land, Pi Artworks, London (2024); Some Seeds Are Still Bitter, Setareh, Berlin (2024); and Playing Chopsticks, SEA Focus with Yavuz Gallery, Singapore (2023).
