Abdullah M. I. Syed

About Abdullah M. I. Syed (he/him)

Abdullah M. I. Syed’s interdisciplinary art practice champions the power of

storytelling from a cross-cultural perspective while working at the intersection

of drawing, painting, sculpture, video, textile, photography, performance,

installation, and public art. For Syed, a studio is a Karkhana (workshop) where

ideas, knowledge and materials are processed and transformed into artistic

propositions through contemplation, play and collaboration.

Syed’s Pakistani Muslim heritage and his wide-ranging research interests—

including arts and crafts, abstraction and embodiment, nature and mysticism,

economics of language and visual culture, and the influences of his everyday

experiences lived inside and outside a diasporic space—all coalesce to create

archival art forms the artist terms as manzoom muzahamat (poetic

resistance). Its power lies in its truth-telling through exploring ideas of shared

histories, vulnerability, care and resilience as he scours the visual landscape

of Western and Eastern contemporary visual culture and deftly traverses their

divergent modes of thought to bring about social change.

Biography

In a career spanning almost three decades, Abdullah M. I. Syed has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at the Art Gallery of NSW; TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto; Asian Society Museum, New York; Pataka Art + Museum, Porirua City; Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; the National Art Gallery, Islamabad; and the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi; among other public and private venues. Since 2022, Syed has completed four public art commissions locally and abroad, notably: Ripple Effect for PHIVE, at Parramatta Square; Tesserae Wall for the façade of Warwick Farm Commuter Car Park and a commissioned textual wall sculpture for the new Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Syed studied and taught art and design in the United States, Pakistan, and Australia and earned a Ph.D. in Art, Media, and Design (2015) from the University of New South Wales, and a Master of Education (2001) and a B.A. in Design (1999) from the University of Central Oklahoma. He contributed reviews and articles to Southerly, TAASA Review, Imprint Australia, and Garland Magazine the Karachi Collective. He has received numerous prizes, including the 2017 NAVA Carstairs Prize, Tim Olson Drawing Prize (Runner Up, 2010) and the inaugural Individual Artists of Oklahoma (IAO) installation art award (2003), UsSA. Abdullah M. I. Syed is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.