Soft Power

Ames Yavuz presents Abdul Abdullah's seventh solo exhibition, Soft Power, featuring a new body of work that re-contextualises clichéd motivational phrases to expose their underlying violence through playfulness and humour. The quotes emblazoned across these large-scale oil paintings come from various sources, including the gym, shared texts and online meme culture. Inspirational sayings are read as invitations to fight in works such as Come and get it and Take your best shot, while others explore double entendres in a more playful way. Abdullah translates fragments of popular image-texts into paintings that encompass the viewer's full field of vision. Reference materials include stock images of bodybuilders and gym regulars; the artist purchases the rights to these images and crops them to anonymise their subjects. The exhibition also explores expressions of extreme communal emotion in works such as Live, Laugh, and Love, which feature Mike Tyson celebrating after a fight, the Japanese parliament in a brawl, and Welsh rugby players huddling. Soft Power coincides with Abdullah's participation in the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, curated by Hoor Al Qasimi.