Faisal Abdu'allah

Faisal Abdu'Allah (born 1969, in London) is a British visual artist and barber who exhibits internationally. Abdu'Allah's practice uses a wide range of media, including printmaking, installation, photography, video and performance.

Early life and education

Abdu'Allah was born Paul Duffus in 1969 and grew up in a Pentecostal family. He was educated at Willesden High School, Harrow School of Art, Central St Martins (first-class honours), Royal College of Art (MA)[1] and University of East London (PhD). In 1991, Abdu'Allah converted to Islam and changed his name. The event was described in the BBC television documentary series The Day That Changed My Life[2] and formed the subject of the artist's 1992 work Thalatha Haqq (Three Truths).[3] He taught at the University of East London (UEL),[4] formerly North East London Polytechnic and The Royal College of Art . He was a visiting professor at Stanford University and is a member of the Association of Black Photographers.[5] In the spring of 2013 Abdu'Allah was an invited scholar and artist at the University of Wisconsin , on the recommendation of Professor Henry J. Drewal, who coined the term "sensiotics". . In fall of 2014 Abdu'Allah returned to Wisconsin, this time as a faculty member in UW-Madison's School of Education where he serves as an associate professor in the Art Department.

Work

Published here with permission from Professor Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz .

The London in which Abdu’Allah was born and in which he matured as an artist was one marked by Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and British art during [this] period was generally stunted by a conservative government that had little interest in or commitment to fund the arts. Anxiety in British society during the Thatcher government was largely precipitated by a period that saw the dissolution of Britain’s imperial world and its slip from a position of world economic dominance, together with […] significant demographic shifts. It was an era when artists, together with broader society, began to demand equal rights for minorities and more aggressively and openly began to put forth varied representations of social struggles taking place in a very class-oriented society.

The art of Abdu’Allah and his contemporaries in the early 1980s can be evaluated in a manner that fills an important void within available scholarship on the subject of contemporary art in relation to Afro-British culture. What began as an artistic gesture in the 1980s more fully materialized in the early twenty-first century as a complete conceptual approach that questioned issues of race and identity in relation to issues of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Race, some have argued, while continuing to gird an important set of [arguments] in relation to understanding cultural formation and location, social history, political conscience, and memory of those transcendental historical moments, is no longer central. Instead, race becomes one of several contested areas of identity, which must be negotiated in society, including national identity, religious faith, and gender. Abdu’Allah’s work broke away from the British artistic establishment and the rules of institutional representation, particularly insofar as he began selecting his subjects from émigré utopia, Afro-British social consciousness, Muslim identity, and working-class life. He also integrated other views of London, portraying it as a city of dislocated communities that were powerless in the existing world of art.

Exhibitions

Since 1994, Abdu'Allah has exhibited internationally including, 55th Venice Biennale; Tate Britain; Sharjah Biennial; Kunstverein Bregenz, Camden Art Centre, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Torino Biennale, Italy; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; British Film Institute, London; Netherlands Photo Institute, Holland; Studio Museum Harlem, NY; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; CAAM - Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Spain; Royal Academy, London and recently the Chazen Museum, US.

Pedagogy

Articles and reviews

References

  1. ↑ Michael Edmands, Artist who is a cut above, The Guardian, 30 June 2001
  2. ↑ Thomas Sutcliffe, Review, The Independent, 24 August 1995.
  3. ↑ V&A website
  4. ↑ ,"AVA Staff – Academic Staff".
  5. ↑ Elizabeth M. Hallam and Brian V. Street, Cultural Encounters: representing otherness, Routledge, p.273. ISBN 978-0-415-20279-4

External links

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