11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Stranger in a strange land (still) 2023 / Five-channel CRT video installation: colour, sound, 23:30 minutes / Courtesy: The artist / Supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Grant 2022 You are enough for someone to love, it’s true (still) 2022 / Documentation of public performance in collaboration with Veenadari Lakshika Jayakody; single-channel video: colour, sound, 4:05 minutes / Courtesy: The artist / Supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Grant 2022 NOTES 1 Artist statement, supplied to the author, 24 May 2024. 2 Artist text, June 2024, QAGOMA Curatorial Artist File. BORN 1985, NAWALAPITIYA, SRI LANKA LIVES+WORKS INCOLOMBO, SRI LANKA Media trends and processes underlie Abdul Halik Azeez’s work, which is also influenced by studies in economics, linguistics and his work as a journalist. Through his projects, Azeez observes the nuances and contradictions in the urban landscape through the postwar transformation of Sri Lanka, subtly questioning the political and social constructs that continue to mould and disrupt the nation, together with the ethnic divisions, violence and unrest that have manifested in the process. His projects take a unique multidisciplinary form, employing multiple temporalities and stepping between devices and visual cues where ‘artworks enter into a cosmology of works that are influenced by and influence each other, creating a constantly morphing space of various discourses’. 1 For the Asia Pacific Triennial, several projects from two bodies of work — Desert Dreaming 2024 and You are enough for someone to love, it’s true 2022 — examine the peculiarities of societal constructs in Sri Lanka. TARUNNAGESH Desert Dreaming began with a motivation to address questions and curiosities regarding the identity politics of Sri Lanka’s Muslim community. In the republic’s postwar climate, Muslims have come under suspicion as a new ‘other’, threatening the fragile worldview of Sinhala Buddhists, who enjoy majority rule. Incorporating tropes from an Islamophobic discourse that emerged following the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the US Pentagon in 2001, the Muslim community was accused of ‘Arabisation’ — of transforming its appearance (mainly through clothing) and behaviour in a manner that was alien to Sri Lankan culture. This discourse intensified in the wake of the Colombo Easter Bombings of 2019, in which a series of suicide bombings at churches and luxury hotels caused the deaths of some 269 people. In investigating the recent history of Sri Lankan Muslims, my family became the first site of inquiry as I found myself dealing with an undocumented history, and so I worked with oral narratives and family photographs. Using found archives, media reports, popular culture artefacts and other forms of evidence, the work traces labour migration to the Middle East, as well as the micro influences of large shifts, such as the neoliberalisation of the economy in the 1970s, the dual civil war that began in the 1980s, and the subsequent postwar transformations in Sri Lanka. I set about deconstructing monolithic narratives regarding what it means to be Muslim in the contemporary world, both from inside and outside the community. Embracing the fluidity and interconnectedness of multiple histories, the project is now evolving into an exercise in alternative world-building. In the Asia Pacific Triennial, the work is presented through a publication, a five-channel video installation, and found and family photographs. The subjects meander across themes of migration, popular culture and spiritual struggle, and explore narratives of globalisation that shift and sit together in ways that defy teleological or linear history. A three-part project, You are enough for someone to love, it’s true makes speculative connections between trance possession, rituals of healing, TikTok and mental health. A recorded desktop lecture performance, Lately I have been thinking about exorcisms and TikTok 2022 cycles through text on a reading device overlaid with an automated voice over that narrates these speculative connections. Accompanying the performance, two videos, Tenet 2022 and You are enough for someone to love, it’s true , document public performances made in collaboration with Veenadari Lakshika Jayakody, an ensemble-based physical theatre artist, actor, creator, educator, dancer, choreographer, mask-maker, mask-player, director and clown. Together, these works question if trance states — seen as a vehicle for the expression of repressed emotions in marginal groups — can be reproduced authentically on social media platforms, such as TikTok. In traditional healing ceremonies, the love of one’s family and community are as much a part of the healing as the ritual dances meant to ward off demonic possession; however, the privatisation of mental health in our neoliberal world requires us to seek community healing through the logic of competition, through the benevolence of the algorithm, for ‘likes’ and engagement. 2 ABDULHALIKAZEEZ ABDULHALIKAZEEZ ARTISTS+PROJECTS ASIAPACIFICTRIENNIAL 58 — 59