Publications

Time to think and space to talk

By: Rohini Malik Okon

Rohini Malik Okon explores the evolving relationship between Faisal Abdu’Allah and The Agency Contemporary.

When Faisal Abdu’Allah received a phone call from Bea de Souza, Director of The Agency Contemporary, in the summer of 1998 he had seriously been considering giving up his practice as an artist and concentrating solely on his other creative pursuit (which he still maintains today) as a hairdresser in the barber’s shop he owns in Harlesden, West London. Frustrated at being constantly pigeonholed as a ‘black artist’ and being offered ‘education’ projects as opposed to commissions, he had begun to feel that he wasn't really going anywhere with his work. When he received a call from the director of a contemporary commercial gallery in the heart of London's East End offering him a solo show, he was more than a little taken aback. De Souza had been following Abdu’Allah’s work for a number of years, after having come across him in a show at the Photographers’ Gallery in the early 1990s. The large-scale photographic portraits of rappers screenprinted on to metal had a definite impact on her, but at that point she wasn’t sure what to do with the work. Wanting to know that there was more to these portraits than their deliberately...

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