The Muzium & Galeri Tuanku Fauziah (MGTF) at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang, Malaysia, an ASEMUS member, presents an exhibition by painter, photographer and painter Ismail Abdullah. Entitled "Burnt/Ashes & Greetings to the Continent", it can be visited at MGTF until 13 April.  

About the exhibition

The exhibition combines two main conceptual themes: firstly, a serial-photo assemblage theme of "Burnt & Ashes"; and secondly, an installation work of photo-objects based on an interpretation of Usman Awang’s poem, entitled “Greetings To The World”. This conceptual triplet-art work constitutes of a serial-picture assemblage, a photo-object conceptual projection transformed into the forms of photo-sequences, photo-painted images, painted objects and visually abstracted conceptual poetry.  

About the artist

An artist-cum-painter, photographer, and poet-writer, Ismail Abdullah is also a member of Anak Alam, KUMPUTER, PENA, PELITA, Penang Watercolour Society and the Malaysia Artists’ Association. He studied Fine Arts at USM, Fine Art Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York and Art History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He reads poetry and has had several art and photography exhibitions, both locally and regionally. Ismail Abdullah taught fine arts and photography at the School of Humanities (1983-1999) and the School of Art (2999-2004) at USM. Between 2005 and 2017 he helped to develop art, multimedia and promotional projects and to support product design programs at UniMAP (Perlis, Malaysia). At present he is a full time writer-artist. In the current exhibition, Ismail Abdullah's arts mainly narrate his idea on conceptual aesthetic and poetic expressions of human mischievous activities and thus project the poor treatments against their own environments. In this show he shares his visual awareness and narratives on erroneous human activities against their environments. This conceptual triplet-art work captured / enhanced the remnants of ashes and burnt images of woods, grass and burnt household objects caused by burning activities. Together with the painted surfaces of the photo-images, he juxtaposed them with the drawn geometric lines and squares so as to visually enhance the conceptualised image-segments and their abstract poetic forms. These serial and photo-painted images were then conceptually and visually translated into squared geometric columns to form a sense of abstract poetry within their wordlessness, visual dialogues and conceptual attributes.

Further information

For additional details about the exhibition, please visit http://mgtfusmpenang.blogspot.com/2019/03/next-exhibition-at-muzium-galeri-tuanku.html