Abdul Abdullah: an Outsider Amongst Outsiders

6 Dec 2019

Abdul Abdullah graces the front cover of Happy Magazine’s latest issue on ‘Outsiders’.

Happy Magazine sat down with Abdul Abdullah in his Sydney studio to interview him about the dangers of romanticising art, how the purpose of his work has changed and what he means by calling himself an ‘outsider amongst outsiders’.

“For me, being an outsider is being one who doesn’t fit the broad societal strokes. Growing up I was probably about nine years old when I started thinking of myself as an outsider, and initially it was not seeing people who looked like me or had names like mine reflected or having their stories presented in the mainstream discourse. If you turn on the TV, if you watch any of the soaps, if you watch any of the reality shows, there was no one that represented my story, or anything that I really related to on that base level. That was the initial experience of being an outsider, for me. Then after 9/11, the experience of being a Muslim in Australia and the vilification of Muslims in Australia, that was very… well, it was a stark difference in the perception of what an outsider is for me.”

Image courtesy of Happy Magazine.