Abul Hisham

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Artist statement

My artistic practice operates at the intersection of power, ritual, and memory, interrogating the structures visible and latent that govern social and cultural life. Situated as both witness and implicated subject within these conditions, I approach my work with a heightened awareness of observation as a political act. The shifting terrain of contemporary socio-political realities, alongside deeply embedded personal histories, forms the primary impetus of my practice. Drawing from media, art history, mythology, and religious iconography, I construct layered poetic visual systems that resist singular readings. These works function as sites of collision, where the mythological and the mediated, the sacred and the profane, the political and the intimate are held in productive tension. Meaning in my work is neither fixed nor didactic; instead, it unfolds through fractures, repetitions, and symbolic residues that demand active engagement from the viewer. I conceive of my role as an artist as that of a conduit between the visible and the occulted translating psychic, historical, and affective intensities into material form. My practice is less a declaration than an excavation, a sustained inquiry into how power inscribes itself onto bodies, images, and collective memory. This work remains an open-ended process, inviting viewers to enter a shared terrain of uncertainty, where ritual persists, memory mutates, and meaning resists closure.

Artwork