Biennale of Sydney: Rememory
Biennale of Sydney Catalogue statement
Abdul Abdullah (b. 1986)
I was 15 years old on September 11, 2001, and feel part of the older cusp of a generation of Muslims whose formative years were overshadowed - if not defined - by the “war on terror,” a vague catch-all with far-reaching, devastating consequences. A recurring throughline in my practice is interrogating how criminality/monstrosity is projected onto benign communities to justify the unjust seizure of land, bodies, labour, and resources. This dynamic was especially clear to me in the lead-up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
My subsequent research examined anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements of the 20th century. I read somewhere the first recorded slave revolt in Haiti was reported at the time as a “Jihad.” I unpacked notions like “the white man’s burden,” seeing how colonisation’s entrepreneurial and commercial ambitions were packaged as the moral duty of the civilised.
In March 2019, I appeared as “on-screen talent” for a well-meaning but ultimately misguided Cadbury Chocolate campaign. It was conceived in response to online backlash over the brand’s halal certification - mischaracterised as a “religious tax” by its opponents. Despite opening new markets and likely lowering costs for the domestic market, Cadbury was accused of pandering to Islamic fundamentalists and paving the way for Shariah Law. The company’s counter was to film a reality-TV-style advertisement featuring diverse artists and designers tasked with creating a new logo to sit alongside the halal symbol, signalling the product was “For All”. A few days into filming, an Australian man entered a mosque in Christchurch and shot and murdered 51 Muslims.
That night, I captured YouTube comments from news footage before they were disabled. The comments - many celebrating the massacre - laid bare the futility of Cadbury’s campaign. The intention to thwart their online backlash was misplaced. It was not about a group being pandered to but rather the belief that the group is an inhuman, invasive and malevolent force that needs to be erased.
My new body of work responds to these patterns of dehumanisation. I have created a triptych depicting scenes from the 2005 Cronulla riots, when more than 5,000 people assembled in Sydney’s south to “reclaim the beach” from Arabs and Muslims. Drawing from the visual tradition of Neoclassical history painting, the works employ theatrical staging and contrived tableaux. These paintings serve both as memorials and as interventions - reinscribing the events into our shared visual and cultural histories, and situating them within a broader global framework of xenophobia, nationalism, and resistance.