Artist Profile – August 2019

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So even on the happiest day of their life, they are still perceived

as criminal.

Exactly. It goes back to a thing that Waleed Aly said in an

interview; he was talking about the Muslim experience and

how the reality of your actions and beliefs are often irrelevant

to how you are perceived.

Have you felt that dislocation?

It’s a peculiar spot to be in. If you identify with, or are perceived

as belonging to an outsider group, you are still an individual,

but you won’t be seen in that way. You will always be perceived

as being somehow representative of that community as a whole,

and accountable to that community. Which is fucked. If I say

something, hopefully people aren’t going to think that that is

indicative of the opinions of all Muslims. I speak as a member of

that group, but not on behalf of that group.

It does strike me as an issue that persists for artists of colour.

When I looked you up online, I noticed that your faith is often

reported alongside your identity as an artist.

Totally. But not by me. I am an artist who is Muslim but I don’t

make Muslim art. There is nothing specifically Islamic about the

visual outcomes of my art. I remember recently (and this was

partially my fault) I missed an email about an artist’s statement

and so a curator wrote one for me. But it was like 200 words

and it said the word ‘Muslim’ around eight times. I was like ‘oh

come on’ – so I rewrote it and the word ‘Muslim’ wasn’t mentioned

once. Being Muslim is relevant to my experience but it is

incidental to my practice.

Let’s talk about your practice; can you tell me about your recent

painting, A terrible burden (2019), that was a finalist in the

Wynne Prize?

The title written across the landscape alludes to Rudyard Kipling’s

poem, The White Man’s Burden (1899). But it’s actually a quote

by John Olsen when he was asked to respond to his status as

Australia’s greatest living artist and, with little humility but maybe

a little bit of humour, he replied, ‘A terrible burden’. I took that

phrase and put it across the landscape, and in my artist statement

I spoke about how the Australian landscape has been engaged

with by people who are drawn to ‘capturing it’.

It’s so funny when you read about Australian landscape painters

talking about going off into the wilderness and marking their spot

out, and it just seems so in line with the Colonial mission – even

if their self-perception is completely different. I’m not saying that

people can’t go out and paint the landscape, but the way people

speak about it is as if they are charged with this responsibility to

capture it.

And then we have the Wynne Prize for Australian landscapes, and

I think it’s fantastic how many Aboriginal artists are in it. But

two years ago John Olsen criticised the winning piece, suggesting

that Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s work was of ‘a cloud cuckoo land’.

It was very dismissive and patronising. Who is being gracious in

this situation?

So there is obviously irony written into your Wynne painting?

Yeah, it’s taking the piss. Yet I don’t want it to be on the nose, I

don’t want it to be hitting people over the head. It’s funny because

I’m a millennial, I was born in 1986, and there is this perception

of millennials that we are meant to be really sensitive but I feel

that so far in my practice I have had to cater to the whimpering

sensibilities of middle-aged white dudes. (Laughs) I have the receipts.

Who is your work for?

I remember talking to a media representative for a politician and

they were saying that there are people that are for their politics,

there are people that are dead against them, and then there is

the persuadable majority in the middle. In a similar way, I’m