Abdul Abdullah
Born:
Australia
Lives in:
Thailand
Location
- Art Gallery of New South Wales
Abdul Abdullah is an Australian multi-disciplinary artist. Describing himself as an ‘outsider amongst outsiders,’ his practice explores the complexities of identity, perception, and the experience of the ‘other.’ His work is particularly concerned with the tension between how identities are projected onto individuals and the reality of lived experience. Identifying as a Muslim and having both Malay/Indonesian and convict/settler Australian heritage, Abdullah navigates a precarious space within contemporary political and cultural discourse. He sees himself as an artist working on the peripheries—of a peripheral city, in a peripheral country—orbiting a world on the brink. His work has been the subject of political censorship, with public figures accusing him of challenging mainstream narratives of Australian culture.
Abdul Abdullah
Born 1986, Boorloo/Perth, Australia
Lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand
North Cronulla Beach car park approx 1:45pm 2025
oil on linen
Mitchell Road approx 2:40pm 2025
oil on linen
Cronulla Railway Station approx 3:00pm 2025
oil on linen
Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous support from TWT Property Group
Courtesy of the artist and Ames Yavuz
Abdul Abdullah confronts Australia’s collective memory of the 2005 Cronulla riots after two decades. Roughly 5000 Australians – predominantly white – assembled at Cronulla in Sydney’s south to begin a day-long assault on anyone of Middle Eastern or non-white appearance. Using the theatrical contrivance of 15th-century Renaissance painting to depict actual documented scenes, these new works both memorialise and reanimate the violence which was fuelled by some conservative media outlets at the time.
Painted from photographs of posed re-enactments – the artifice of which is not erased from the final image – Abdullah exposes the ease with which memory can be manipulated or exploited. In revealing this facade, he suggests that the coordinated attacks were more closely related to a vigilante mob riot than a legitimate protest grounded in genuine concerns for national identity.