Dark Matter-pdf

On the Art of Dislocation By Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz Stuart Hall, in his article “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain,” refers to three waves of visual artists in the history of the Black diaspora in post-war Britain.1 Faisal Abdu’Allah fits into what Hall calls the second wave, a generation of artists characterized by their strong anti-colonialist attitude and focus on race as a central and determining ideology. According to Hall, African diaspora artists of the second wave did not have a direct experience of discrimination akin to that of the first wave practicing in the 1920s and 1930s, whose principal approach was what he described as attempting the “symbolic restoration of [an] African connection.”2 Instead, these artists are engaged in a rediscovery of their African identity: first as a symbolic process and second as a generalization and symbolic restoration that could be only achieved by translation of an imagined community through its New World displacement.3 This argument suggests a significant contradiction common to the way many scholars, including Mark Sealy, Paul Gilroy, Zig Layton-Henry, and Anne Walmsley, have approached issues of cultural legacy and identity in modern and contemporary arts through a framework in which “Africa” continues to be conceptualized as a generic term rather than one characterized by cultural specificity or concrete references to artistic traditions that arrived in the Americas as a result of the slave trade. In other words, there is no theoretical model in contemporary art critique that analyzes African aesthetics and functions within the margins of Western culture or art, or delineates the process of negotiation between two aesthetic models within the context of British cultural hegemony. Kobena Mercer is one of the few authors who address the aesthetic problem regarding AfroBritish artists, examining spaces of African cultural practice and alternative institutional practices within and outside the British cultural institutional practice.4 92 Abdu’Allah’s work also explores these issues, documenting social transitions, from his early prints produced in Boston about the increase in Black consciousness to his later images testifying to the devastation of London by the uprising of the Black British Muslim community following a cycle of marginalization of under-privileged social groups, retaliation, and the general aggravation of socio-cultural differences that resulted from a politically conservative climate culminating in Thatcherism and its attendant values. Proficient across media—including printmaking, photography, portraiture and installations—Abdu’Allah’s impact on and value to the ongoing development of contemporary art history is still being understood. The British Scene Through the 1950s, Great Britain was a nearly uniformly Christian nation. Although there was a slowly growing Jewish community, broader religious and cultural diversity did not increase materially until the 1960s when a considerable number of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs arrived in the country. This increase significantly changed the religious landscape of the country and by the early 1980s, Britain had a non-Christian religious community of 2 million individuals.5 Throughout this period, the Christian community itself also changed substantially; as the dominant Anglican Churches of England and Scotland and the Methodist church were joined, particularly in the 1970s, by resurgent evangelical churches and other independent Pentecostal churches popular within the growing population of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Occurring at the same time was the significant increase in other religious groups, most notably Hindus and Muslims, as the immigrant population from Asia increased dramatically, as did the creation of formal religious organizations, publications, and sanctioned places for religious practice. This had a direct impact on the development of higher forms of religious practice and worship as well as on levels of religious commitment. The British Muslim community grew significantly in size in the 1980s and such increased membership contributed in the construction of mosques and large-scale architectural projects in contrast to previous decades where existing buildings were 93 transformed into Mosques. A paradigmatic example of such architectural projects was the construction of the Regent’s Park Mosque in the center of London. This mosque has a positive effect in creating a sense of stability and dignity between members of the Muslim community and also encouraged the idea of integration of this community into the fabric of British society.6 Despite, or in some ways related to, its rapid growth and visibility, the Muslim community in Britain faces (and continues to face) three major integration challenges. The first relates to its geographical origin, these communities came from a social and historical diversity due to the legacy of the British Empire in India, Pakistan, and the Middle East from nineteenth century British colonialism. Secondly, the Muslim community had divergent representations of their religious traditions such as Sunni, Shi’a, Sufi, and legalist. Finally, the social aspects of religion make it very difficult to distinguish between forms of religious teaching and cultural practices, which relate directly to social experiences. Such experiences include marginalization and the often related increased reliance on religion and enhancement (entrenchment) of identity practices, deficient legal representation around Muslim social issues in the British judicial system, lack of economic integration into society, and identity conflicts. This era has also seen an increase in the political debates about the Muslim community in relation to existing areas of tension with British social paradigms, including sexuality, the role and status of women in society, and the legacy of a British education system that did not tolerate other forms of religion.7 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 such 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 the aforementioned 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 94 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 argument in relation to understanding cultural formation and location, social history, political conscience, and memory of those transcendental historical moments, is no longer central.8 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. “The Art of Dislocation” exhibition at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in 2012 explored the manner in which Abdu’Allah brought together these groundbreaking elements and the degree to which he engaged common subject matters such as representation of social disparity, social commentary, vernacular philosophy, self-representation, and the very language of stereotype. It also analyzed how Abdu’Allah’s critique of the status quo and his sympathetic position in representing a universal experience of London for all underprivileged groups opened up new avenues in British art and still resonates today. his training as a printmaker under professors Tony Martina at the Central/Saint Martin School of Art and Tim Mara at The Royal College of Art, London. The heavy use of multiple visual elements is found in Abdu’Allah’s later prints, including I Wanna Kill Sam (1993) in which he uses aluminum plates in place of paper surfaces. Such surface material choice has been described as suggesting that the “bodies looks like they have been carved from marble.”10 As described by Bryan Wolf, Abdu’Allah’s use of aluminum plates made “the bodies look like they are being consumed by their own abstraction,”11 suggesting that the degree of pixilation of the print and the manner in which the depicted subjects were mirrored and multiplied by each individual portrait raised an ontological question about self-perception of the viewer. The work self-devours and dematerializes its subjects, not merely as a result of the acid acting on the surface of the metal plates, but in a more subtle way in which one can simultaneously visually experience being at one with the nature of the other figures depicted on the aluminum plates and encountering oneself through viewing life-size images. In other words, it invites a double understanding of oneself and the other. Historicism and Insurgence Wolf went on to comment that “Abdu’Allah’s work makes you feel a sense of shame when you experience self inadequacy in understanding his subject, familiarity, and otherness within some visual resemblance and a sense of guilt experienced publicly.”12 Such comment alludes to the most striking feature of Abdu’Allah’s visuality is his creation of a sense of “disconcertment,” a state he uses to create and maintain in the viewer a sense of anxious embarrassment and unpleasant emotion. By juxtaposing an experience of moral incorrectness with the subjects he explores, such as racial stereotype, masculinity, cultural dialogism, and iconography of violence, Abdu’Allah creates and plays upon a sense of remorse. The art of Faisal Abdu’Allah is, first of all, about dematerializing surfaces. Burning the paper, drawing lines to cover most surfaces, creating holes, and building narratives around the resulting absence of material. He speaks of the primary goal being “to exhaust the paper to its physical limit.”9 This process, vital to his early work, would go on to form a core of his broader body of work, including the later-produced photography and multimedia projects. An important step in Abdu’Allah’s artistic career was enrollment at the age of twenty in the Massachusetts College of Art, and his early work during this period evidenced The images call to mind the idea of extended family practices among Caribbean communities in London and moral issues surrounding a community’s right to self-representation. Abdu’Allah, a member of such Caribbean community, represents a paradigm in the vernacular domain of a culture heavily influenced by African-American popular culture that plays critical role in the formation of Afro-British fashion identity. His images also share an iconographic trait with early Hollywood publicity of Western movies as well as with James Bond movie posters for the 1964 film Goldfinger.13 His sharply spatial conception of the images portrayed mirrors the social concerns that imbue his work. The images represented through a collection of distinct pixels can reconstruct themselves, but only when seen from a distance, when the pixelated images become clear and the images operate in conjunction with one another. Similarly, the images can be understood as “re-materializing,” emerging from the act of dissolving the metal surface and reappearing in a new physical form. Although Abdu’Allah’s series came out of his training as printmaker and long use of the silk screen-printing process, there is a clear allusion to Andy Warhol’s series of portraits of Elvis Presley. Like Warhol’s Elvis series, Abdu’Allah’s I Wanna Kill Sam series share an insistence on repetition that is a very common trait in Pop Art visual strategy in relation to the vernacular culture, images of publicity, and media. However, instead of using the same type of image as Warhol does, Abdu’Allah uses similar sized aluminum plates, but always containing a different portrait. A more striking difference between the two series is the visual principles underlying them: for Warhol repetition will always be better than one unique piece, each repetition will be different from the original master print as a result of the imprecise printing process and human error; whereas for Abdu’Allah repetition has more linguistic implications insofar as a similarly constructed image is varied within the consistent genre of portraiture, like the infinite richness and variety of language. Such repetition alludes to verbal differences, which raise the issues of consistent concern to Abdu’Allah such as masculinity, the embodiment of Blackness, the consumption of images of violence associated with Black imagery in the media, and issues of memory in which the individual prints articulate moments of his relationship with the people portrayed. A Shift Towards Dislocation The posing of ontological questions is a theme that characterizes the current practice of contemporary art. Contemporary art is produced in a conscious way that invests in an exploration of its own nature and existence (materiality), its multidirectional temporality, and global cultural-geographical awareness. The new type of artist is supposedly better adapted psychologically than his or her predecessors and is outfitted with a new repertoire of categorical descriptions; the artist is 95 “global,” “nomadic,” “diasporic,” and of a “post-identity” era. Among Abdu’Allah’s virtues is his status as an exception to this self-conscious global trend. Abdu’Allah is an example of how a vulnerable artist outside of the mainstream contemporary art community is struggling to make visible his own perspective. The effect of recent global economic challenges on the art world has exacerbated its existing tendency to overlook emerging minority artists seeking to challenge accepted social narratives. Abdu’Allah’s ontological realization emerges independent of direct influence from the legacy of institutional practices toward race and cultural minorities. Instead, Abdu’Allah’s cultural tolerance is informed by factors more concrete than mere subjective responses, such as his knowledge of racial history, political will and practice of law, and his aspiration that necessary changes will occur in society and that a more transparent debate around such issues can take place across the political spectrum. Beginning in the late 1990s, Abdu’Allah turned to the idea of space as political in the larger sense of touching issues from museum display to local politics and social commentary. Abdu’Allah developed a series of rooms which utilize what I call the “rationalism of geometric spaces” in favoring a more sensorial and participatory experience of the viewer. These rooms conceive spaces as abstract environments capable of engaging different types of people and challenging racial prejudices, class biases, and behavioral habits determined by identity as well as political ideas about who has the right to see or be a part of a given artificial public space. The first examples of this type of piece were commissions by leading British institutions such as The National Maritime Museum and the Horniman Museum and Gardens. Realizing that the nature of the commissioned projects allowed him to research the political history of each institution and consider it as a mirror of the British political spectrum, Abdu’Allah also explored the past censorship by such institutions and the role they played in the historical segregation of museum practice in the United Kingdom. Garden of Eden (2003), was designed not as a utopian space to be used to promote multiculturalism in global cities, but rather as a space for reflection on the self-oppressive mind aggravated by privileged assumptions about racial politics, economics, and class. Inspired by his knowledge of the work of minimalist artist Dan Flavin, including Flavin’s 1964 installation at Green Gallery 96 in New York City and Carl Andre’s 144 Zinc Square from 1967 now on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Abdu’Allah explored extreme scale architectural intervention as part of Garden of Eden, a collaborative project with the architect Sir David Adjaye. Together, they proposed new ways to experience existence in physical spaces directly associated with human behavior and its unspoken power relations. They proposed a different connotation of space and physically designed it in order to enable a way for the viewer to politically experience it, a type of “political geometry” that would engage people psychologically in experiences of color (blue and green for English people and black and brown for Afro-British) by guiding them topologically through a clearly defined space in order to engender the development of a process of self-recognition of oneself in the space. Garden of Eden attempts to critique such a legacy and responsible role of Empires for the postcolonial self-reflective critique within postcolonial London. It is a minimalistic space designed to contrast with that oversaturated with advertisements in newspapers and the sensational press in wide circulation in British public spaces. In one room, the viewers are themselves visible by viewers in another room, although they are unaware of such observation. Only viewers with a certain eye color (green, grey, or blue) are permitted to enter the central room, while those with brown eyes must enter a surrounding space. Such division and assignment of perceived privilege is misleading; those who have been granted entry into the central sanctuary are unaware that they are being observed from outside. These spaces and acts of division, enforced by a carefully chosen mathematically-precise formula, become spaces for meditation that enable the materialization of public representations and social perceptions of violence. The resulting paradox of exclusion, inclusion, and violation is an ideal vehicle for the questioning of assumptions about the racialization of violence and its continued association with the Black body and minority cultural groups more generally. In the piece, observable privilege is determined by eye–and thus skin–color, visible icons in the popular imagination that become for Abdu’Allah gesture of subversion as well as political statements. Like Flavin and Andre, Abdu’Allah emphasized that the quality of the space closely involved the audience in the experience of the sculpture, making the piece an achievement of architecture rather than a mere object. One radical difference between Abdu’Allah and his predecessors is that, in contrast to Flavin 97 and Andre, he creates a new spatial realm that changes the basic physical principles of the space, transforming the physical properties of the original space from the inside. Utilizing ideas of sculptural installation from Flavin and Andre as well as Richard Serra’s notion of exploring the formal and perceptual relationship between artwork and the viewer, Abdu’Allah describes his work as an exercise of mapping. Inspired by Serra’s idea of using mapping to record an architectural experience, Abdu’Allah explores ways in which to provide new boundaries for the relationship between the artistic space and the viewer, including boundaries that are politically informed. Believing that the viewer’s racial conscience, political ideas, and class affiliation will determine the way in which they will respond to the art, Abdu’Allah constructs the space in relation to those notions, intentionally provoking a self-reflective encounter with other bodies. Garden of Eden is not a traditionally politically engaged and visually conceived work. The extremity of the disparity of spaces and the restricted access to each unique space determined by eye color mirrors the extreme social situation of racism. The common space and experience in society are the starts in his new presentation (environment), which change in form into a perceptual space for a sociological speculation with roots in social reality. A similar kind of conceptual understanding is visible in the site-specific installation Passage exhibited in 2009 at LAXART, Los Angeles by artist Walead Beshty. Beshty’s work focuses on the idea of artistic materialization, particularly through photography, depending on random occurrence as a mode of transformation, a process he called “brute materiality.”14 The concern around recording the material condition of the structure at a particular point in time is one that Abdu’Allah and Beshty share, and is one characteristic of their generation, one characterized by increased globalization and the sense of a possible new order, an opportunity to explore metaphysical, political, and psychological crossroads. Garden of Eden also provides the most complete example of Abdu’Allah’s use of text as a primary conceptual tool, a form of verbal support designed to frame specific ideological responses to physical enclosures conditioned by the verbal references conveyed through the text. In this piece, the artist uses a reference from the 1999 film The Matrix that refers to issues of accessibility, destiny, and illusion in a dialogue between the “Neo” and “Morpheus” characters. Rephrased, Abdu’Allah replaces certain key words from the original script, those that he 98 viewed as most relevant to the experience or process of artistic cognition. For example, he replaces “matrix” with “garden,” creating an antithesis between the digital and artificial realm and the natural, organic human realm.15 In doing so, Abdu’Allah turns a conceptual text of publicly consumed, and thus accessible, media into an ideological reference to the lack and openness around themes common across his work such as race and violence. Art Always Matters In his print series Malcolm X, produced between 1990-1991, Abdu’Allah began to explore what has become one of the principal themes seen across his artistic practice–his use of portraiture. The title of the series refers to Malcolm X, a critical, if controversial, figure in the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s known for his combative style of activism and his intellectual engagement. Many of the existing representations of this emblematic figure used portraiture as a vehicle to highlight the transcendental aspects of what Malcolm X was thought to represent, diverging from the past stereotypical images of unhappy Black people. Abdu’Allah’s approach to portraiture combines two important tactics. First, Abdu’Allah consistently manages to negotiate the differences between ideology and physiology, between the myth of the archetypal figure and its more human aspect. This approach is consistent with that of early British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), who emphasized melancholy through her use of direct verbal correlations between the photographic subject and the publicly known writings of John Milton and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Such emphasis is seen in references in her pieces’ titles such as The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty (1866) and The Angel at the Tomb/Freshwater (1869).16 These early photographs were developed in a direct relationship with written forms of expression and enabled Cameron to portray popular culture of her era. Abdu’Allah’s uniquely utilizes her concepts relating to writing in his own work by replacing both writing and the limited physical space of a photograph by using a high contrast print to compose the subject in black and orange, black and gray, or black and white. As such, the written connection that dominated Cameron’s photographic exercise is replaced by direct verbal fragments of Malcolm X’s own words as secondary registers equally prominent in the frame. The second tactic central to Abdu’Allah’s portraiture work is his fascination with the idea of a common hero. Heroism as one of the attributes of Black leaders is shown through his remaking of God in human form, images inspired by hope and almost prophetic. Showing Malcolm X as a type of hero in disguise counters the authoritative and hypercritical texts and reviews of the era which portray Malcolm X as an extremist who preached racism, Black supremacy, and xenophobia. The Malcolm X photographs are composed using a typology similar to that employed by Julia Margaret Cameron, with both artists posing their models in front of the camera with a black backdrop that helps to dramatize the subject and suggest a new physiological dimension. In Cameron’s Iago, Study from an Italian (1867), the model is shown in a manner associated with biblical literature on King David and Christ. Abdu’Allah replaces Cameron’s associations with the religious culture of nineteenth century England with a common hero of his time, Malcolm X, the Othello of the twentieth century. The photographs in Abdu’Allah’s New Orleans series (20082011) titled Humanity, I am Still Waiting, Madame Levauh, and Second Line were produced during the artist’s 2006 residency at Project Row Houses in Texas, a year after the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in New Orleans. These images, printed on paper, show Abdu’Allah’s commitment to social issues, his political consciousness and his street photography skills, three key elements in his conceptual photographic experience. This work shows a clear connection with Abdu’Allah’s early work and evolution of his subject matters. These photographs rely on a specific type of image and an analog strategy for their production. Taking the images spontaneously while walking through the city with a medium format camera allowed Abdu’Allah to record his subjects, the un-posed faces of the city’s inhabitants, naturally, and to display the unbearable mark of nature as a metaphor for the intertwining of political ineptitude and human resilience. A similar tradition is seen in Walker Evans’s Subway Passengers, a series of photographs made on New York City underground trains in the 1930s using small hidden cameras. Unlike Evans, Abdu’Allah approached his subjects with their knowledge, allowing his artistic expression to come second to the subject’s right to choose their own images. Abdu’Allah assumes direct contact between disposition and photographic form and uses such connection to excite certain social awareness in his audience, celebrating the resulting political involvement and passionate engagement with the pressing issues of one’s time. A Reversion of Faith Central to the development of Abdu’Allah’s personal and professional artistic identity was his adoption of Islam during the years he spent in Boston. Rather than a conversion, Abdu’Allah describes his change of faith as a reversion, an act of returning to his family’s roots and to ancestral traditions connected to his African slave descendents in Jamaica. Although changing his faith and certain of his outward expressions of identity, including changing his name from P. A. Duffus to Faisal Abdu’Allah, he never doubted or dismissed the continued importance of his British cultural and national identity and continued to embrace this, as well as his Jamaican roots and Pentecostal religious upbringing. In the photographs used in Thalatha Haqq (1992), Abdu’Allah appears in front of the camera dressed in a traditional Muslim garment in a sequence of images that begin with a gesture suggestive of the process of prayer in the middle of a side street two blocks away from the Picasso museum in Barcelona. The image creates a window to a public display where you can see the intimate view of both an individual of faith and a city, a combination that evokes in the viewer an extraordinary feeling of being out-of-time and out-of-place and engenders a significant level of intimacy. This series of images is also a record of a trip that played a critical role in the development of Abdu’Allah’s Muslim consciousness as it was his first encounter with Islamic cultural traits in a city other than London, in a place where such cultural legacy appeared to be accessible through public access to building façades and architectural forms. Abdu’Allah’s photographic work comprises two phases: the first in which the artist is a photographer, initially comprehending a photographic event by capturing the moment of exposure, and the second in which the artist is a printmaker, transforming his photographic documents through installation into propositions of more corporal and sensorial experiences. For example, in Thalatha Haqq, during this second phase, the photos migrate from the paper onto the glass and from flatness into a three-dimensional visual experience. This sense of threedimensionality allows Abdu’Allah to project those changes that took in his own spiritual transformation and self-discovery as a Muslim. 99 100 Some of Abdu’Allah’s most significant works touching upon themes of religious and social structures are the two-part photograph and now tapestry titled Last Supper I and II (1996– 2011), and Revelations (1996–2010). These works are without a doubt Abdu’Allah’s most visible and well-known photographs. In these pieces, Abdu’Allah engages in an exchange with classical art historical pieces which have also clearly influenced the history of photography. At first glance, the careful posing of the people in the photos creates a feeling of having documented a single moment in time. Abdu’Allah photographs his subjects in full costume, paying particular attention to highlighted details such as the gun, the ring and the religious garments, as well as elements symbolic of status including emblems of labor, such as boots, popular fashion icons like baseball caps and coats and domestic references like the wooden bowl. The embodiment of such visual symbols speaks to the way in which popular culture is transformed visually and coded using the body as medium and in which beauty, politics, cultural identity, and leisure are realized largely as intellectual achievements of the vernacular culture. The Aesthetic of Violence Abdu’Allah’s second level of engagement with the traditional religious legacy of Western art history is his deliberate association with Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous Last Supper. The Last Supper’s symbolic sharing of a religious and spiritual legacy alludes not only to Western religious tradition, but also to Abdu’Allah’s own early tradition within the Pentecostal faith in Jamaica and the United Kingdom. The photo’s reversal of ethnicity and cultural traits of the original Last Supper proposes a degree of unsurpassed inclusion. Abdu’Allah replaces the traditionally portrayed Jewish guests with newly reverted AfroBritish Muslims, the apostles with modern “townies.” Through these transformed images, Abdu’Allah negotiates a new type of inclusion within the realm of religious artwork. He advocates that discourse around issues of hybridity, creolization, and syncretism as essential cultural and conceptual phenomenais critical to understanding the colonial context in which African slaves were forced to abandon their own religious heritage in favor of conversion to Christianity. Despite these powerful, modern statements, Last Supper and Revelations are striking in the degree to which their composition reflects the conventional art history canon. Abdu’Allah’s concentration on the human body reflects the focus of Da Vinci’s classic Renaissance painting style and use of religious iconography common in chromolithograph images of religious scenes often displayed in domestic spaces in the Caribbean. This system of re-evaluating the subject (violence) also transforms its representation into a possible liberation from the coercion of social assumptions. Violence is transformed from a social phenomena marked by the public vernacular and political inquiry into an object of devotion and value. Challenging an environment in which damage is experienced publically, Abdu’Allah attempts to explore all possible outcomes of a narrative of violence, including one involving clear evidence of transformation and the divergence and reconvergence of the conceptual ideas of grotesque violence and pristine art in a one single space and time. An early criticism of the use of violence in aesthetic forms was made by Plato in The Republic, when he argued that the foundation for justice is a condition of moral obligation and suggested that the most important of all moral emotions is fear, expressing concern that using rhetoric and visual expression to exacerbate fear was manipulative and damaging to society.17 Such observation provides a useful foundation for understanding one of the central themes explored across Abdu’Allah’s work. Like Plato, Abdu’Allah rejects the celebration of violence and instead uses images relating to violence to criticize its nature and question its contemporary celebration. Abdu’Allah goes on to suggest that what goes on in the theater, in one’s domestic space, or in one’s mind, is connected to what one does in life. Violence has been used by public media as a pillar with which to construct a cultural fear that opposes the ideal moral obligation that every citizen should have with his or her society. I Wanna Kill Sam and Fuck Da Police (1991/2010) are two examples of multimedia projects that are informed by issues of social trauma and seek to both represent and explore the tension between social trends informed by racism. In other words, these works challenge existing representations of cultural, ethnic, religious, and national identity groups. Six photographs printed on aluminum plates are displayed as a single narrative of violence in I Wanna Kill Sam, a piece based on a series of portraits Abdu’Allah took of his friends that had been heavily informed by the “mediatization” of violence in the British context after the uprising of 1981. Describing himself as a social storyteller, Abdu’Allah visibly challenges the assumptions associated with existing representations of cultural, ethnic, and religious differences across his body of 101 work, perhaps most notably in Fuck Da Police. For example, the use of the hood to cover the subject’s face alludes to public assumptions regarding violent tendencies and criminal behavior of individuals dressed in such manner. Abdu’Allah’s first large-scale printings and installations, I Wanna Kill Sam and Fuck Da Police take their title from the American vernacular of violence and popular verbal phrasing about police brutality in the 1980s in Britain. The two references installed in the same space simultaneously invite the viewer to relate two physical spaces and elongate the subject in which minorities experience violence worldwide. Although made in response to earlier violence in the United Kingdom, including Notting Hill riots of 1958 and the Brixton and Handsworth riots (Birmingham) of 1981, these images also bring to mind more recent occurrences such as the August 8, 2011, fatal shooting of a local man, Mark Duggan, by police in Tottenham, London, and the political unrest in northern Africa generally referred to as the Arab Spring. These photographs raise a question about the ethics of depicting the moment of violence and brutality. The room is treated as one single installation and uses the allegory of violence and brutality imprinted in the memories of Abdu’Allah and his contemporaries, the images echoing those originally published as news pictures and circulated in local newspapers and tabloids. A second issue explored in this installation is related to images of desire. The series I Wanna Kill Sam includes self-posed portraits of Abdu’Allah’s peers in which the willing subjects bow at the camera. Prior to shooting the images, Abdu’Allah asked the subjects how they would like to be photographed. The subjects universally recalled the most popular images that circulated through the media (MTV) about African American culture in the United Kingdom. All the portraits seem to cast the viewer in the role as someone who experiences publically a form of social embarrassment. At the same time, the specific experience with the bodies depicted and printed on aluminum plates gives the subjects a “larger than life” quality, a materiality that transcends the human flesh yet is nevertheless completely absorbed by its own abstraction as digits and pixels printed on a surface. This strategy of dematerializing and re-materializing became a central principle’s in Abdu’Allah’s production of the images. This paradox of “being and not being” poses complex questions such as who is looking and why, what is a photograph, and whether we should join together with, or refuse, this point of view. 102 The Embodiment of The Social Looking at Abdu’Allah’s images, most people equate his embodiment of Black subject as representative of Black masculinity. What does it mean to consider masculinity as subject matter? Why is recognition of this theme relevant for observers when they approach Abdu’Allah’s imagery? Is masculinity a virtue that can be depicted through a specific signifier? These questions inform much of Abdu’Allah’s work, and the initial assumption is that the representation of a Black male responds to the need to articulate and embody an important new perspective on the ongoing debate around the meaning of masculinity. Unlike the ambivalence associated with images constructed by the white dominant culture of pleasure and erotic leisure, Abdu’Allah’s own Black identity, and position outside the mainstream socio-political center of power, allows him to inform and invest in a moral exploration that allows the self-provocation and contestation of his own construction of Black subjectivity. Abdu’Allah also seeks to challenge the manner in which existing images of Black males produced by Black males have been instrumental in legitimizing and promoting a stereotypical view of Black manliness. Artists such as Glenn Ligon have argued that eroticized images of Black males “den[y] the lives of the men depicted”18 and such portrayals were not, as others including bell hooks have posited, the result of a binary white (oppressor)-Black (oppressed) construct. Instead, Ligon argues, Black artists have continued to represent themselves in what they believe to be a manner representative of their own stories, but that is in fact endowed with intentional, but destructive constructions of Black men as failures, sociologically handicapped, empty headed, dangerous, violent, and sexually obsessed.19 Ligon focuses in particular on what he calls Black male phallocentrism, explored through his inclusion of sexually explicit, stereotypical images of Black men in albums of family snapshots in his photo essay A Feast of Scraps and argues that it was not externally imposed, but rather emerged as a result of African American nationalism in the early 1960s.20 Ligon goes on to state that phallocentrism and an outsized focus on sexual prowess and aggression continues to engender ambivalence within African American communities and contributes to a destructive framing of relations between the genders. bell hooks points out that “Most Black nationalists, men and women, refuse to acknowledge the obvious ways in which patriarchal phallocentric masculinity is a destructive force in Black life, the ways in which it undermines solidarity between Black women and men, and other ways in which it is life threatening to Black men.”21 Within this context, Abdu’Allah explores what kind of representations of the Black male body will constitute and help define a type of Blackness not as more primitively close to nature, sexually aggressive, enormously endowed, or physically imposing. Imagining an alternative to both this sexualized stereotype and the typical embodiment of the Black subject in the racist white imagination as an “outsider, rebel, irrational, immoral, irrational, and incapable of reason.”22 Abdu’Allah’s depictions insist on Black racial and gender identity drawn from local history, memory, and reflective of the psychology of the time, one shaped by questions of inequality, religious identity, cultural differences, and the pervasive images of African American fashion in Britain. His portrayals force viewers to question their own perception of racial and other markers of identity, exploring the range of assumptions, and implications embedded in the array of representations of Black males. Prelude to DARK MATTER How could one understand new works by Abdu’Allah’s within the exhibition DARK MATTER? How have they fit aesthetically and conceptually into his artistic narrative? Abdu’Allah delimits these unique pieces by offering the definition of dark matter. Abdu’Allah uses a scientific term as an analogy to the social conditions and conceptual challenges that artistic production requires today. On the one hand, the linguistic analogy allows us to associate issues of social and political urgency like Black Lives Matter concerning racial violence in the United States and its global repercussion. Perhaps paradoxical and provocative, his suggestion of dark matter as the central theme of the new pieces goes beyond political commentary and social criticism. Abdu’Allah attempts to balance what visually appears to be predictable with a new way of conceptualizing and recasting his art. It could be understood that Abdu’Allah is putting into practice the Islamic concept of “falsafa,” not necessarily as a derivative of the Greek term of philosophy. The central issue in Abdu’Allah’s new artistic production is much closer to extending the Islamic notion of spirituality that was regarded as the idea of wisdom in classic Greek philosophy. He recreates through creative aids what was historically understood as falsafa from the development of Quranic revelations and translation of classic Greek philosophy with particular attention to Aristotle. Abdu’Allah plays with a historical ninth-century tension between falsafa associated with knowledge and wisdom with other notions such as kalam (theology) and tasawwuf (mysticism). Conceptually, mysticism for Abdu’Allah has to do with action or achieving a goal toward which one has worked and experienced rather than theoretical knowledge. Through political changes and direct intervention into our social condition, art fulfills a central function. The pieces are not representations of events, social violence, independent political actions, or proposals for comments on social conditions. The works are conceived as collaborations and exchanges with other artists. This collaborative effort allows him to equate philosophical questions concerning the natural essence of God with questions about the disappointment of the human condition, free will shadowed by social and political violence, and the relation between realization and defining a cultural essence as African American. For example, in the series In the Hands of the Duppy (20202022), Grave Diggaz (1998/2022), and Patent (2022), he questions the permanent nature of knowledge as it questions not the eternity of God’s word but the verbal exchange among friends. The wisdom of ordinary people and the freshness of the creative perfection in rap pioneers’ lyrics are also remembered. Furthermore, by evoking the fullness of family and realizing the maturity life imposes on all of us through time. In the Hands of the Duppy and Grave Diggaz could be understood as a rescue mission, a historical recovery, or a prominent intervention in a silenced history. Strategically, Abdu’Allah plays with the mechanical process of making and revealing photographs by associating that process with the tools and the quasi-ritualistic nature necessary for the barbershop experience. He suggests that the photographic technique known as tintype and hair cutting are transformative processes of being, which allow for articulating experiences of self-definition and personal fulfillment. The Patent and Prince Hall (2022) series follow a different logic by treating history as an object that can be shaped. He proposes a new relationship between historical fact and the object produced in the historical moment, reevaluating the thing that functions to link the omitted fragment of history. Suggesting the absent history, the restoration of account must be a meditation through this artistic proposition and premeditation of 103 the work of art produced with the missing record. Art here works as a new kind of historical tradition that lives on in the collective or impersonal memory of those who remember it. The tension between the omitted history and the possible history is retained in the premises of the community, yet obscure by mechanisms of historical alienation such as racism, social injustice, and dehumanization of the African American community. There was, and continues to be, a distinct strain of utopianism in Abdu’Allah’s work; a steady determination to reclaim international art themes and languages. This determination is manifest through both the artist’s skilled use of techniques including the de-materialization of surfaces, the creation and manipulation of space, the expert use of portraiture, and the incorporation of verbal or textual support, as well as through his selection and exploration of difficult contemporary themes, including the transformation of religious and social structures, and the role and influence of violence within and with respect to portrayals of the Black diaspora. This essay is an excerpt and expansion of Bárbaro MartínezRuiz, Faisal Abdu’Allah: The Art of Dislocation (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno-CAAM, 2012) in response to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition DARK MATTER. 1 Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History,” History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring 2006): 17. 2 Hall, 18. 3 Hall, 18. 4 Kobena Mercer, “Iconography after Identity” in Shades of black: Assembling black arts in 1980s Britain, ed. David Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 49-58. 5 John Wolffe, “Religion and ‘Secularization’” in 20th Centruy Britain: Economic, Social, and Cultural Change, ed. Paul Johnson (New York, NY: Longman, 1994), 432-33. Data based on census from 1982 of Christians from Church of England, Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church. 6 Wolffe, 237-38 7 Wolffe, 437-38. 8 Hall, 3. 9 Conversation with Faisal Abdu’Allah, London, United Kingdom, Summer 2004. 10 Conversation with Annie Cohen-Solal, Stanford University, November 12, 2010. 11 Conversation with Bryan Wolf, Stanford University, November 9, 2010. 12 Conversation with Bryan Wolf, Stanford University, November 9, 2010. 13 Edward Buscombe, ed., The BFI Companion to the Western (New York, NY: Athenaeum, 1988), 161, 186, 197, and 383. 104 14 Douglas Fogle, Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture (London, UK: Phaidon Press, 2010), 46-49. Text re-phrased by Faisal Abdu’Allah from the original script of The Matrix film. The Matrix: Dirs. Lilly and Lana Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. 16 Ian Jeffrey, How to Read a Photograph: Lessons from Master Photographers (New York, NY: Henry N. Abrams, 2008), 22. 17 Plato, The Republic (New Haven, CT: Tale University Press, 2006), 38-70. 18 Glenn Ligon, “A Feat of Scraps” in The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation, ed. Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (Boston, MA: The MIT University Press, 1995), 89. 19 Ligon, 89. 20 Ligon, 89. 21 hooks,bell, “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” in The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation, ed. Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (Boston, MA: The MIT University Press, 1995), 83. 22 hooks, 74 and 80. 15 105