As a Muslim artist with Malaysian, Indonesian, and Australian heritage, Abdul Abdullah’s work draws from the complexities in his own identity to address the tension between the perception of identity and the reality of lived experience.
Entertainers
As a child, Abdullah was deeply impacted by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, an influence that has carried over into his works today. Among the artist’s recollections is the memory of a man tearing the hijab off his mother’s head.
In 2015 joint exhibition with his brother Abdul-Rahman, Abdullah showed the vastly misunderstood Entertainers (2013), a portrait of a figure wearing a balaclava with eyes and mouth assembled from the features of Beyoncé, Kayne West, and Madonna.
While the collage was meant to convey the artist’s experience growing up Muslim, The West Australian newspaper accused the artist of promoting terrorism.
Controversy and Censorship
Abdullah’s 2017 exhibition Terms of Engagement: Examining the Rhetoric of Radicalisation at UNSW Galleries showed portraits of young Muslim people engaged in criminal activity, reflecting stereotypes popularly associated with Muslim people. Amongst them, Bride 1 (Victoria) (2015) and Groom 1 (Zofloya) (2015) depict side-by-side portraits of a woman and a man dressed in white, heads covered in balaclavas.
Equally provocative images like All let us rejoice and For we are young and free (both 2017), which depict portraits of Australian soldiers overlaid with smiley faces, were met with censure from local government members, who demanded the works be removed from the gallery.
Political Resistance
Abdullah’s satirical portraits were followed by thick line drawing series like ‘What’s mine is yours’ (2020), in which figures are strangled or held in a headlock against serene waters and orange cloudscapes.
The same year, Abdullah participated in 52 ACTIONS at Artspace in Sydney, for which he exhibited photographs of his text-based tattoos alongside short passages describing how each serve as a reminder of his political principles.
In a 2017 conversation with Ocula Magazine, the artist expresses the importance of having a ‘generous’ art practice with a variety of ‘access points—whether they are aesthetic, conceptual, historical or political’ to create different ways for audiences to enter the conversation.
