Mohamed Abdulla has been working on a ceramic tombstone in the clay workshop, where he has created several models. Afterwards he to photographed them and reversed them into blocks as an ‘undo process’.
Oct. 2025
My artistic practice resonates with the lifecycle of silkworms and the serial progressions of development, particularly the four distinct stages: ova, larvae, pupa, and imago; each stage requires a different environment and performance.
Due to my nomadic research life, I had to throw away a lot of work, which was painful. During my residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, in 2012, I developed an artistic approach that tackled several issues, including the lack of financial and logistical support, presentation space and storage. It was titled, ‘If It Does Not Blast In Belfast, It Blasts In Baghdad’. I created hollow porcelain sculptures to explode them with explosive devices fixed inside, shooting bullets, using a robot and/or laser.
But I didn’t get permission to explode them, so the ‘undo process’ emerged. I reversed the creation process: dismantled the sculptures with a modelling cutter, a wire cutter, and a knife, soaked the dried sculptures in water, and threw the fired sculptures from high altitude, and others struck them against each other.
At the beginning of the call to Islam in Mecca around 610 CE, some believers argued with pagans. The believers asked, “Why do you worship lifeless idols?” The pagans replied, “We do not worship idols, but rather the spirits that inhabit them.” In a similar vein, I approach artwork as being that reincarnates itself in correspondence to the conditions, contexts and settings.
Early in my career, I had to gather many sculptures aside, and then I realised that the sculpture’s backs are more interesting than the fronts, because we are educated and un/consciously focus on the sculpture’s front while the sides and back are forming. On this, I foraged an argument, saying that the core challenge is to liberate from the intention and let the urgency create its existence. What has happened at SVFK is reincarnated in a digital appearance.
