Portrait of the artist in the firing line: Abdul Abdullah on controversy, threats and rightwing hate mail
As an artist, Abdul Abdullah wears his humour on his sleeve, but also on his skin. His tattoo of the Southern Cross encircles an Islamic crescent moon and star, and he got it for the purpose of Them and Us, his photographic selfportrait that won the 2011 Blake prize for human justice. In his 2013 work, Self-Portrait as an Ultra-nationalist, he wears a “Fuck off we’re full” T-shirt and an Australian flag. The same year, he made It Doesn’t Matter How I Feel, in which he’s painted black except for his hands, one of which is held in a thumbs-up, the other extending the middle finger. I could go on.
“I’m a seventh-generation Australian and I’ve got the Australian sensibility of relentlessly giving people shit,” he says innocently.
Born in Perth in 1986, Abdullah can make the rare claim that one of his ancestors came to the country 200 years ago, on the naughty ship Indefatigable. When he talks to Guardian Australia, he’s downing brushes at his studio in St Leonards, Sydney, finishing up a 12m painting for his show at the Armory Art Fair in New York. He’s as genial today as he is in his 2015 Ted Talk (in which he wore the T-shirt “Australia: Drive it Like You Stole It”), when he said that he hoped his work would “create an environment that encourages critical thinking”.
Unfortunately, you can only lead the horse to water. In December, Abdullah’s artworks All Let Us Rejoice and For We Are Young and Free were singled out of the touring exhibition Violent Salt by Nationals MP George Christensen and Mackay local councillor Martin Bella. The whole exhibition – populated largely by Aboriginal artists – is overtly political, but Abdullah’s work featured the armed forces, any reference to which seemingly provides a hall pass for aggressive jingoism and an interpretation of insult to Anzacs, no matter the original intention of the artist or writer. Bella complained on Facebook that the works were disrespectful, and that Abdullah had defaced images of serving soldiers; Christensen that taxpayers and ratepayers should not subsidise political messages that attacked soldiers.
Abdullah, whose grandfathers both fought in the second world war in New Guinea, had worked with Yogyakarta workshop DGTWB to create embroideries of Australian military personnel, their eyes obscured by sunglasses. Stamped over their unreadable faces are crude smiley emojis.
The backlash from Christensen and Bella’s Facebook posts was swift and brutal. Abdullah’s works were removed from the walls of Artspace Mackay at the behest of the Mackay mayor, Greg Williamson, and threats were made to both Abdullah and gallery staff.
For Abdullah, it was déjà vu. Back in 2016 he was pictured in the West Australian in front of one of his works that depicted a balaclava. Some readers, taking into account his name, made the assumption that the work was advocating terrorism. It was actually a collage, with one eye belonging to Kanye, one to Beyoncé, and the mouth to Madonna. The clue was in the title: Entertainers (Kanye, Beyoncé and Madonna).
The reaction was much the same, he says: “State gallery; tax-payer funded; their tax dollars are supporting terrorism; petition to stop the show; threats made to the gallery; letters to the editor.”
He is pleased that the director of the Noosa regional gallery, where Violent Salt travelled to next, reached out to the local RSL to open up the dialogue, and that the same may be happening with the other points of the tour.
Abdullah says his previous work on this theme has only had positive responses from veterans. The juxtaposition of the intimidating exterior of the military subjects with the smiley emojis is an indication of the brave faces such personnel are forced to wear. “I think veterans are treated poorly when they come back to Australia. There’s a culture of ignoring mental health concerns in serving men and women, and also police force, ambulance workers and firefighters.”
It was for this reason that, in 2016, he painted Craig Campbell, who left the police force with PTSD after defending two Middle Eastern men during the Cronulla Riots. “He was treated quite
poorly by the NSW police and only fairly recently won his legal battle to get his treatment,” Campbell says. The painting marked Abdullah’s third time as an Archibald prize finalist.
“I’ve used [the Archibald] as an excuse to meet people,” he says. “I painted huge heroes of mine, even on the years that I didn’t get in, like Tracey Moffatt.”
He began in 2011 with Waleed Aly – chosen because Aly’s book People Like Us described Abdullah’s predicament of being an outsider among outsiders (“being an artist among a society of Muslims puts you on the outside, in the way that you approach things”) – and received his first hate mail.
“It was all along the lines of that I should go back where I came from,” he says. “I spoke to the invigilators at TarraWarra and they said they hadn’t had such a divisive work in their gallery. Initially I got really upset, but Waleed encouraged me to use my creative abilities to respond, as opposed to getting angry about it, and it marked a shift in my practice. Up to that point, my paintings were just pretty pictures of my friends, nothing political about it.”
In 2013, he was a finalist with a painting of Anthony Mundine. Abdullah and two of his brothers are artists who box, but it’s his sister who owned a boxing gym, where Abdullah worked for 10 years. The local hero in WA was Danny Green, but Abdullah noticed that once the cameras were off it was Mundine who was giving his time toamateur boxing clubs and Aboriginal programs. Abdullah painted Mundine a crown, the way Basquiat would when he painted Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. That was the first time he’d overlaid a graphic on to one of his paintings, such as the way he did with the armed forces smiley emoji. “Basquiat’s another hero of mine,” he says. “Probably a hero of a lot of boy art students.”
His finalist work for 2014 was a painting of Aboriginal artist and activist Richard Bell, who Abdullah still counts as his mentor (“I think he’s the best artist Australia’s ever produced”). In it, Bell is in a space suit, casting a critical gaze down on the country. Bell’s work also features in the Violent Salt exhibition, though he has not been similarly censored.
I ask Abdullah if he worries that censorship is on the rise, and talk turns to Sydney rap group OneFour, who are being targeted by the NSW police’s Strike Force Raptor on the grounds of their lyrics inciting violent crimes. That a show was recently shut down seems reminiscent of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s tenure as Queensland premier, when police regularly invaded punk shows and harassed people in attendance. According to the ABC, Sergeant Nathan Trueman of the strike force has also requested that streaming services remove OneFour’s music from their libraries.
“I listen to their music a lot,” Abdullah says. “The idea of an institution or power structure deciding what can and cannot be rapped about, or what is appropriate to make art about, is absurd. I was reading the Osman Faruqi interview with the police officer who asked why they couldn’t make songs about their beautiful wives, and it seemed like such a peculiar expectation from 20-year-old Samoan guys from western Sydney.”
Of course, it’s all too relatable. “Without turning this into a poor-bugger-me story, I have to explain myself more than my artistic contemporaries,” he says. “Alternative narratives of cultural expression are seen as being some kind of threat to culture, which really is a dangerous space for us to be in.”
I’m a seventhgeneration Australian and I’ve got the Australian sensibility of relentlessly giving people shit
Abdul Abdullah