Faisal Abdu'Allah
Family Ties, 2012
pigmented inkjet print on photo rag paper
40 x 76 in.
edition of 8

The images in Faisal Abdu’Allah’s 2012 series of color prints at Magnolia Editions were photographed by the artist in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Faisal Abdu’llah has made some of the most complex, politically telling and aesthetically challenging works of the past decade in the United Kingdom. […] Faisal’s work situates him as the earliest and most accessible single artist of a generation and provides a commentary on the manner in which visual images of Afro-British and Muslim communities, the aesthetic of violence, popular culture sensibility and film have played a critical role in the shaping of contemporary British imagination. What Faisal’s art reacts against is the general assumption that Afro-British artistic production cannot successfully reconcile social conscience with aesthetic viability. In his work, there is a sensibility that affords a gaze at an aesthetic grounded in both an analytic philosophy of popular culture and media and a Western art history.

Perhaps Faisal’s favorite theme has been his utilization of photographic representations and cinematic narrative to put forth a commentary on a general spectator’s relationship with topics including self-reflection, the search for social awareness and the confrontation of long-established assumptions and stereotypes. Faisal’s understanding and use of visual representations does not ignore the history and cultural contexts in which images, semantic and visual expressions originate – including the art world, popular culture or specific cultural traditions (British, Muslim, and Jamaican).

– Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz