MOHD FADLI YUSOFF

Stand and Choose Yourself, 2010 (left)

Our apartment is actually two units combined as one and the other living space has become our family room. Here we hung Fadli’s piece produced after his ‘11 years of wilderness’. He is very religious and he had read a fatwa that forbade the depiction of figurative work. It was only 11 years later, after devoting himself to landscape and abstract art, and going deeper into the religion, when he found fulfilment and understood that realism in Islam is a form of dakwah – a conversational process through which he could spread knowledge of Islam. This museum piece comes from his Md Fadli Yusoff 2007-2012 show. It is a commentary with Fadli as a self-portrait in modern clothing and traditional garb, and asking the viewer to find their morality, philosophy and spirituality in the present.