Artist Profile – August 2019

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ABDUL ABDULLAH IS NOT

INTERESTED IN SHOCKING YOU, HE IS

INTERESTED IN SPEAKING TO YOU.

EACH OF HIS ARTWORKS CONTAINS

AN INVITATION OF SORTS, WHICH

DRAWS THE VIEWER INTO A

CONVERSATION THAT IS SOMETIMES

CHALLENGING, SOMETIMES

DIFFICULT, BUT ALWAYS IMPORTANT.

Abdul

Abdullah

Story

TAI MITSUJI

H

ow you would describe what you do?

I see my role as an artist in a similar way to a journalist, where I am

communicating an idea, but without being burdened with any objectivity.

I can be as reactive and responsive and emotional as I like. I work primarily with painting,

but I work with pretty much anything I can put my hands on.

What things make you want to be reactive, responsive and emotional?

One of the main things that I want to do is encourage my audience to afford the specificity

and complexity to others that they afford themselves. And if they can do that then we

are on to living together in a better way. I am looking specifically at the experience of

marginalised groups and minorities, and power dynamics.

How do these ideas make their way into your work?

Well, the genesis of my work You See Monsters (2014) happened when I was watching

the original Planet of the Apes on my laptop and in the background on the news, on a

TV screen, was old footage of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The news pictured

mujahideen riding on horses across the desert and, just by chance, on my computer screen

the gorillas were riding on horses across a desert hunting humans. They both portrayed a

monstrous ‘other’ – the threat on the horizon, who throughout the history of literature and

cinema is always there, always savage. So in You See Monsters I’m wearing a mask from

Planet of the Apes. It’s almost an accusation thrown at the audience, about how they see a

person like me.

How was it received?

People were taken aback and were confronted. I don’t mind that, but they weren’t

confronted in a constructive way. Too many people were – to not beat around the bush –

repulsed by the imagery.

Wow, r e a l ly?

Yeah, so one of the things that I want is to embed as many access points in my work as

possible. Whether the artwork is in a school or a museum, I don’t want there to be any

obvious reason for people to dismiss or censor it. Ideally, I want them to interrogate ideas

without getting defensive. So with my artwork Mutual Assurances (2017), I portrayed

a wedding because it is a broadly understood ritual across cultures. In the photograph,

there is a married couple sitting on a Malay wedding stage. But then, I’ve subverted that

imagery by putting the figures in balaclavas, which plays with the idea of the projection of

criminality and terrorism on bodies that would otherwise be innocent.

01 Abdul Abdullah, 2019,

photograph David Charles

Collins