Abdullah M. I. Syed: Everything and Nothing

It’s unseasonably warm when I visit Abdullah M. I. Syed in his new studio in Parramatta Artists’ Studios in Granville. The space is bare, except for his research material and the perfume of rose petals, coffee and dates. For all the time that I’ve known Syed, his hospitality has been a constant, not just socially but extending into his artistic practice. For Syed, the act of thinking, making and consuming art is as much a gesture of articulating the nuances of our complex world, as it is an offering to his audiences.

It’s been months since I last saw Syed and I start the conversation by asking him what’s new in his world. “Everything and nothing,” he says, a characteristically elusive response. Syed, I’ve learnt over the years of our friendship, operates in the space of lyrical ambiguity, and is often more concerned with understanding the nature of any given question, than providing an answer.

Born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1974, Syed spent his childhood living between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where his father worked for an airline. He travelled extensively through this period before moving to Oklahoma to study and practice art and design.

He finally settled in Western Sydney, Australia in 2006. For Syed, his travels and perpetual diasporic experience is akin to the cyclical migratory patterns in nature, and one that he traces back to his parent’s own decision to leave India and establish their family in neighbouring Pakistan in the 1960s. This realisation has guided his design and visual arts training and has continued to create new platforms for his artistic practice today.

Syed draws on his Muslim South Asian heritage and practices what he calls manzoom muzahamat, or poetic resistance, which seeks to combat the tensions embedded in our complex social and political climate through expressions of shared vulnerability and resilience.

He predominantly works in a Western post-colonial context, which brings with it an opportunity to unpack the long and intertwined histories of Western contemporary art and South-Asian arts and craft practices. On the day that I visit Syed, his studio is filled with reference images and books on Islamic Art; Persian and Mughal miniature paintings; art and design history books detailing American and Australian Abstraction; and of course, a vast array of international bank notes, which have become a familiar material and symbolic field for Syed to create within.

The last few years have been a productive period for Syed, with his works now in major national and international private and institutional collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; University of New South Wales; US Art in Embassy, Pakistan; and the Devi Art Foundation, India. He has also completed recent public art commissions such as Woven Cascade, 2023, Australian Embassy, Washington D.C.; Chahār Bāgh: Garden of Knowledge mural, 2023, UNSW Library; and Ripple Effect, 2022, PHIVE Parramatta.

This extension into the public domain is significant, not least because of the conceptual and formal resolve that these commissions represent. While his earlier work could be recognised for its experimentation and diversity of form, now it is notable for its use of minimalist geometry, specifically the motif of the circle. For Syed, the circle is ripe with potential as a symbol of the eternal, a referent of the celestial, and for its recurrence in natural phenomena including the life rings of a tree, the concentric circles created by rippling water, and even within strands of DNA.

For his upcoming exhibition Vessel in Cosmic Drift at Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Sydney, this June, Syed has focussed his attention again on the circle and its various manifestations. He explains that he wanted to understand his own compulsion to return to abstraction, and how the most fundamental circular forms, such as a bowl, can reveal transformative ideals.

Syed shows me a recently completed work from his Currency of Love series (2016-ongoing), which incorporates small concentric rings meticulously cut from an Iranian banknote into a kind of miniature landscape painting. It’s reminiscent of Syed’s contemplative photograph, Ripples, 2023, and will also be included in the exhibition. Each of these works are profound, not only in their beauty, but because of Syed’s gift for making harmony from the seemingly extrinsic.

MATT COX
Curator of Asian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Warrane/Sydney

“I was intrigued by first seeing Abdullah’s work in his Parramatta studio. The studio appeared as an interesting cross between a design lab, a tailor’s and a boutique gallery. I was immediately struck by the care at which the various sketches and maquettes were arranged but also the meticulous detail that they exhibited.

“After conceiving of an idea, Abdullah works methodically to realise it, but that doesn’t mean he is unbending, in fact quite the opposite, he is very responsive to change, and it is this gentle navigation of the changing conditions that have brought forth some very revealing and profoundly moving works. I’m always impressed to see how his refined and delicate works possess such persuasive and emotive power.

“Abdullah’s attention to the poetics of labour, in other words his surrender to the beauty of finely crafted and sometimes fragile objects, is rare and a critical strength in an art landscape somewhat beguiled by the sparkle of large shiny things on the one hand, and political posturing on the other. This love of craft stems from childhood moments watching his mother stitching and sewing and has helped him find a connection between text and textile, using weaving to create an tactile language for sculpture.

“Abdullah’s is the kind of work that demands time and focus, which feel like rare commodities in an endless stream of images, so the relevance of his work is that it requires us to pause, to take stock, to remember and to imagine.”

SALLY DAN-CUTHBERT
Director, Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Warrane/Sydney

Representing Syed since 2020, Sally Dan-Cuthbert reflects on his “thought provoking, sensitive [and] sincere commitment to researching cultural forms of art making.” She continues: “Abdullah has recently finished and installed a major commission for the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C., and won multiple public work commissions including the new Parramatta Library part of the PHIVE precinct.

“There is great interest globally for Syed’s work. When we presented a body of new work at Sydney Contemporary in 2022 we sold all work – placing one work in an important Australian foundation collection and the largest work went to a collector in America who acquired it through the advice of a Australian collector who attended [the fair] and spotted it. In his first solo exhibition [with us] Common Threads Run Deep in 2021 , we sold all Syed’s currency based work and placed his large Aura work in an important private collection and the pair of small Aura in an international corporate collection. We always have commissions on the books.

“Syed resonates widely, particularly with collectors who understand and appreciate detail, skill and fine art. Syed makes art that you want to spend time with – his work is sensitive, humorous, intriguing and perfectly melds Eastern and Western culture. Syed’s work addresses social, economic, political and cultural themes.”