Faisal Abdu’Allah, After Kosuth, 2014.
Photo, drawing and 24 carat gold plated head, 20 x 30 feet.

Faisal Abdu'Allah is a British artist and barber. His work includes photography, screenprint and installations. He supports and engages with the practice-led research of the Research Insititute.

"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 materialised 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.

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."

Excerpt from ‘The Art of Dislocation’ by Professor Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

faisalabduallah.com

abduallah@wisc.edu

• Associate Professor of Art
• Faculty Director of The Studio
• Member at Large | SGCI
• Joan Mitchell Foundation Award | 2016-17
• Romnes Faculty Fellow Award | 2017

Latest exhibition

The Park Royals - winning entry of the OLD OAK and Park Royal Development Corporation's Annual Art Commission