Hi, my name is Abdul Abdullah.
Welcome to my studio in Sydney.
I do a whole lot of painting here.
I've been living in Sydney for about six or seven years,
but before that I grew up almost entirely in Perth.
My full name is Abdul-Hamid Bin Ibrahim Bin Abdullah.
I go by Abdul for short.
I'm the youngest of three brothers all called Abdul,
but I get to use Abdul Abdullah
because I got all the social media handles first,
So I locked it down. [giggles]
On my paternal side, I'm a seventh-generation Australian.
And my mother, she is from the Bugis tribe,
which is originally from Indonesia,
but she grew up in Malaysia.
I've been making art for as long as I can remember.
I was really lucky, like my mum was very supportive
when I was very small, making drawings.
And both my older brothers went to art school
and they're quite a bit older than me.
So when I was in primary school
and in the beginning of high school,
and they were the coolest people in the world to me,
they were both studying art full-time,
so I was really drawn to that
and it seemed a really natural thing for me
to go on to study that eventually.
When I'm making an artwork,
the beginnings happen all over the place,
so sometimes there's an idea
that's been bubbling in my head for a couple of years
that finally comes out as an artwork.
Other times it's a news story,
or a meme,
or a film that I've seen that's inspiration for it.
When I'm thinking about an artwork,
and one of the privileges that I have now,
like being a full-time professional artist
with access to all sorts of different materials
and different avenues to create a work,
is that I think have the idea first
and then think of the best way to materialise that idea.
And in the past, it's always been painting.
I use these traditional ways of telling stories
but telling my stories, which happen to be current,
I guess, because I'm here now.
[sniggers]
My practice has definitely been shaped
or formed by my political experience in this country.
So 9/11 happened when I was about 14 years old
and I went from being the '3Bs', I think,
the 'brown, broke and beautiful',
to an existential threat, depending on where I went,
and it was a really confronting thing to experience.
And when I was very young,
all I did was just get very angry about it
and that reflected in the way that I lived my life
and I would, you know, I was just an angry young man.
And it was through my creative practice,
it gave me a platform but also helped me articulate
those frustrations to channel those frustrations
into something that was positive.
For me, art has been invaluable in that process
and I think that it's really valuable for other people
who are experiencing similar things,
and it might not be the same political context,
but there's certainly a whole lot of frustrations out there
and that art is a good way to get your head around things
and to get people to listen, too.
Like, I don't think people would listen to me
if I wasn't making pretty pictures.
I entered the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2016.
I entered a painting called 'Go about your business'
and, with that particular painting,
it was an image of an Australian soldier
in Afghanistan where I obscured their face
and changed the colour of their uniform
to make it an anonymous figure,
and then over the top I spray-painted a smiley face.
So there's a big, garish smile,
it's almost like vandalising the image,
but not vandalising image because it's still
a friendly smile over the top, almost an emoji.
And it plays around with these two things.
One, where you've got a person that's
essentially an invading presence in a country
and that person is covered in guns,
but then over the top you've got this smiling,
like, 'don't worry about it,
there's nothing to see here',
that sort of thing is going on.
I think it's really important, regardless of the platform,
I want to use it as an opportunity
to put a work forward that makes a political comment
and is in line with the rest of my practice.
Like, I never want to do just a nice painting
or something like that or a pretty picture.
It has to mean something to me personally.
I thought the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship
was a good opportunity to talk about these things,
because it has so much prominence
and it's a chance for you to say something real.
When I speak to young artists
or speak to young people who are wanting to pursue art,
the first bit of advice that I give
is for them to find a community
and to find a community of like-minded people
who are interested in the same things,
who they can lean on or can be lent on
to help each other and to share resources,
to build practices, put on shows
and to find like new and unique opportunities.
And residences are a really good way to fast-track that.
And my experiences with residencies,
especially overseas, was a very quick way to find
like-minded people, who are working not just in the country
or in your city or in your town, but in our region or in the world.
So I've spent a lot of time doing residences in Indonesia
and through that met a lot of artists in Southeast Asia,
of my generation.
And we've created a network,
and a network sounds kind of cynical
when you say it like that,
but it's a network of friends,
who also share opportunities,
who are sounding boards for each other's practices
and help refine ideas.