Abdul Abdullah: ‘People made assumptions about who I was and what I stand for because of my name'

The Guardian

a day ago

At Bankstown Central, Abdul Abdullah has become lost. 'Far out, this place is bigger than I thought' he texts while gamely trying to locate me, also lost. 'I think I was in the basement.'
It's been three decades since the artist, then nine years old, fell in love with the labyrinthine and luminous shopping centre then known as Bankstown Square. He has since built a successful career across major galleries and public broadcasting, and relocated to Bangkok – and the Square has been demolished and redeveloped. 'The best place in the world was the World 4 Kids toy shop, and the koi pond in the old town square,' he says.
These are happy memories from what he remembers as a tough time. He and his parents moved to Sydney from Perth for a year so that his dad could work at Malek Fahd Islamic high school. His three older siblings, all over 18, stayed on the other side of the country. It wasn't just that Abdullah and his parents were living in a sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment and sleeping on a shared mattress ('I can remember every piece of furniture,' he says, laughing), or the long days accompanying his dad to the school early in the morning and then staying back until he finished his work day. It was the culture shock.
The Perth Muslim community he'd grown up in had been predominantly south-east Asian; in Sydney, he says, 'I was one of the only kids in the class who didn't speak Arabic. You were kind of thrown in the deep end.'
Abdullah is wary of 'poor-bugger-me stories' and tends towards laughter and lightness in conversation. 'It wasn't the best year for me and my family,' he admits, as we escape the mall and make our way across the train tracks and down into Bankstown's bustling central plaza. 'But it was interesting living in a completely different place. And that koi pond was pretty nice.'
Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning
He has often felt like a fish out of water. Growing up as a Muslim with mixed Malay and white convict ancestry in Perth's south-eastern suburbs, he has previously recalled how only the white kids were referred to as 'the Aussies'. He followed his two brothers into boxing and drawing at a young age, and travelled an hour to attend a high school with a selective art program, but as he grew older he came to feel 'too boxing gym for art school and too art school for the boxing gym'. He laughs as he says this, framing it as a joke – but also describes approaching art school with an underdog boxer's adversarial chutzpah.
'[I felt like] the brown kid from the wrong side of the tracks who didn't really fit it in,' he admits.
We reach the Grahame Thomas cricket ground and pause to chat while watching a men's soccer team limber up under a moody, overcast sky.
'I think all artists are a little bit outsiders,' Abdullah reflects. 'We're all sort of gremlins looking in from outside the house.'
But even as recognition and accolades have accrued – including a mentoring role on the ABC's arts and mental health show Space 22, and most recently, winning the Archibald's packing room prize – Abdullah has felt this more than most. He can't shake the feeling, he jokes, of being an 'outsider among outsiders'.
Abdullah was 15 and playing Gran Turismo with his brother Abdul-Rahman when planes flew into the World Trade Center in September 2001; they turned on the TV and watched the footage in horror. 'At first I didn't think it had anything to do with me,' he says. 'Then the next day my mum was assaulted.' Men pulled her into a store in a busy Perth street, and tore off her headscarf; no one intervened. The family's local mosque was defaced.
Overnight, Abdullah's experience of being a Muslim in Australia changed. 'It reframes you immediately,' he says.
It forced a political awakening that has infused every aspect of his life – though it took a while for him to embrace it. He enrolled in art school and fell in love with painting. 'I didn't really think about politics a great deal while I was there,' he says. 'All I wanted to do was portraits, and I would just paint pretty pictures of my friends.' It's a characteristic moment in which Abdullah flips from earnestness and sincerity into irreverence and self-deprecation.
Then two years after graduating, in 2011, he entered a portrait of author and commentator Waleed Aly into the Archibald prize – and got his first hate mail.
'As soon as the finalists were published online, I got a spate of really nasty messages telling me to go back to where I came from,' he says. It shocked the young artist. 'I hadn't been personally targeted like that before.'
The painting is innocuous – a sombre portrait of Aly on a plain background – and at the time Abdullah was a virtual unknown. 'All [they] had was my name, and people made a lot of assumptions about who I was and what I stand for because of that,' he says.
Sign up to Saved for Later
Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips
after newsletter promotion
Five months later Abdullah won the Blake prize's human justice award for a photographic self-portrait titled Them And Us, in which he displayed a torso tattoo combining a Southern Cross with an Islamic crescent moon. Again, he copped a backlash.
It was the beginning of a prolific era in which Abdullah used his body and the camera to turn a lens on mainstream Australia via a series of images of himself as a supposedly monstrous other.
With age and time, the work changed – but the complaints kept coming.
'It's never from the general public that the furore starts. It's from [politicians or] the media,' Abdullah says.
So he is wary of media coverage. During our photoshoot he notes a recent article in The Australian about his packing room prize win that characterised him as a 'Pro-Palestinian activist artist' and used an old headshot of him frowning, his cap backwards. 'I don't know where they got it, that photo's from so long ago,' he says. 'I'm always smiling in my photos.'
Given his own experiences, he was not surprised when his friend and fellow artist Khaled Sabsabi – a Lebanese Australian Muslim – was attacked in The Australian and then in parliament over old artworks supposedly promoting terrorism. But he was shocked when Sabsabi was sacked as Australia's representative at the prestigious 2026 Venice Biennale less than 48 hours later.
He worries about the message it sends.
'Institutional spaces in this country have, for a long time, felt not welcoming to huge swathes of people that they should be for … [and] things like this just reinforce the idea that [the arts] is not for some people. That as hard as you work, you won't ever be accepted and celebrated or acknowledged,' he says.
The racism against Muslim and Arab Australians that reared its head after 9/11 has never really gone away, Abdullah says. 'It felt like it went away for a while, a little bit, but it's all very much still there.'
Recently, he's been reflecting on another flashpoint of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiment: the Cronulla riots. Abdullah was 19 when mobs of young white men descended on Cronulla beach on 11 December 2005, yelling abuse at and physically assaulting anyone of Middle Eastern appearance. 'I remember seeing [on the news] people wearing T-shirts that said 'save 'Nulla, fuck Allah' and 'ethnic cleansing unit',' he says.
December marks 20 years since the riots. Abdullah recently completed a large diptych painting depicting the train carriage where rioters attacked two young Lebanese Australian men, for a group exhibition at Mosman Art Gallery. The right-hand panel shows a throng of violent bodies pressed up against the windows; the left is eerily empty. Graffiti-style text over the top reads: So where the bloody hell are you? It's the slogan from Scott Morrison's Tourism Australia campaign, which debuted the following year; it also echoes the text messages sent out by the instigators of the Cronulla riots.
It's the first overtly political art Abdullah has made in five years. In the intervening time, he moved to Bangkok and branched into the international commercial art market – and jettisoned political and Australia-specific references in his work. 'I don't know if it's just getting older as well – being a little bit gentler with the way that I'm practising, and also wanting to enjoy people's reactions a little bit more,' he says, with a slightly sheepish laugh.
I ask him if he anticipates another backlash, and he shrugs. 'I guess I'll brace myself for it a little bit.'
'I've never been under the false impression that this wasn't an adversarial space,' he says, with a wry smile. 'When people talk about safe spaces in museums and that sort of stuff, it's never really rung true for me. Like, I'm working in spite of things.'
Abdul Abdullah's packing room prize-winning portrait is showing at the Art Gallery of NSW until 17 August as part of the Archibald prize exhibition. His painting Cronulla is showing at Mosman Art Gallery until 17 August as part of Curlew Camp. He will present new work as part of Sydney Contemporary art fair from 11-14 September and the Biennale of Sydney from 14 March-14 June 2026