Ames Yavuz is pleased to present Abdul Abdullah’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery titled Soft Power.  The new body of work re-contextualises clichéd motivational phrases to expose their underlying violence through playfulness and humour. Soft Power coincides with Abdullah’s participation in the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.

The quotes emblazoned across these works come from various sources, including the gym, shared texts and online meme culture. Inspirational sayings can also be read as invitations to fight in works such as Come and get it and Take your best shot. In other works, the artist explores double entendres in a more playful way such as, Have a go which is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the number plate of his brother-in-law’s four-wheel drive, later discovered to also be the title of a local Western Australian newspaper for retirees. In Abdullah’s hands, language regains its malleability.

Abdullah translates fragments of popular image-texts into large-scale oil paintings that encompass the viewer’s full field of vision, “much like a picture on your phone,” as he puts it. The reference materials include stock images, such as those depicting bodybuilders and gym regulars. Playing with the constant production, capitalisation and appropriation of identity on the internet, Abdullah purchases the rights to his reference images and crops them to anonymise their subjects. In these works, the artist literalises the notion of a body as canvas. Like his approach to text, the close focus on ‘aspirational’ bodies calls into question their aesthetic, social and personal value. Soft Power also explores expressions of extreme communal emotion. In the works Live, Laugh, and Love, we see images of Mike Tyson celebrating after a fight, the Japanese parliament getting in a brawl, and Welsh rugby players huddling, respectively. Recalling the aesthetics of absurdist digital collage, the works present shrapnel-like moments of euphoria and hysteria with a disarming aesthetic foil.