The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SIGNS OF EXCLUSION Some of the most commonly debated social issues in Australia concern relationships between and perceptions of different community groups. In a 2011 self-portrait by Abdul Abdullah titled Them and us , the artist sports a new tattoo that marries a crescent moon and star —part of the national symbols of several Islamic countries —with the Southern Cross, an emblem that has recently become associated with anti-immigration sentiment in Australia. Similarly, Janenne Eaton invokes the phrase ‘these people’, recognisable from the vernacular of Australia’s long-debated asylum-seeker policies, and part of the ongoing innuendo around border control where the jargon of domestic politics intersects with the global refugee crisis. Such language reduces communities, common histories and social responsibility to something abstract, quantifiable and anonymous, a product of collective angst and anxiety about unknown, unnamed foreigners. In his more recent ‘Coming to Terms’ series 2015, Abdullah refers to a longer and broader history of discrimination against Muslims. Working in his mother’s birth country of Malaysia, the artist composed portraits of local brides and grooms with reference to Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel Zofloya . Dacre’s book tells the dramatic tale of a wealthy family embroiled in affairs and murders of passion and revenge, to the ultimate destruction and pervasive immorality of nearly the entire cast of characters. However, within the expansive narrative, the titular character, a north African Moor servant, assumes the role of the antihero. The depiction focuses on his dark complexion to heighten a sense of evil, presenting him as an oversexed murderer and seducer — the devil in disguise. Written at a time of a growing fear of slave-revolt in Europe, it represents a long, evolving history of xenophobia. Abdullah invokes such sentiment through images of brides and grooms with faces masked in balaclavas. He draws on weddings as a symbol of optimism, instilling them with a symbol of apparent