Abdul Halik Azeez

It begins on a Colombo street with a telephone. Abdul Halik Azeez, who first reached an audience not through a gallery but through the Instagram handle colombedouin, raises the most ordinary of cameras at the most ordinary of scenes, a wall, a hoarding, a half-built junction, a face in a crowd, and finds in that pedestrian surface the pressures working beneath it. His art was built in public, on a feed, before it was ever hung on a wall, and the everyday city has stayed its whole subject.

He was born in 1985 and trained across economics, journalism and linguistics, working for a time as a journalist and as an independent researcher into hate speech and the language of exclusion. That grounding shows in the images: he reads the visual traces a community leaves behind the way a linguist reads a text, alert to what the surface of a place discloses about power. His themes are the ones the city presses on him, the remaking of Colombo and its urbanisation, ethnic and communal division, and the position of Muslim life in a Sinhala-Buddhist-majority country; his work sets out the weight of majoritarian politics as a fact of the everyday rather than a headline.

The method refuses the fine finish of the traditional photograph. He works with the public means of media and print, with text, with tiled installation and the phone image, questioning what form art is allowed to take. His photo-essays, among them ‘The Violence of Memory’, hold poetic and disquieting instants together; his contribution to the artists’ book ‘The A to Z of Conflict’, published by Raking Leaves, sets the vocabulary of a war-shaped society down letter by letter. In 2024 he assembled some 350 photographs into a single tiled constellation, ‘If you free your mind, the rest will follow’, at Cinnamon Life in Colombo, a whole city read at once from its smallest fragments.

The exhibition record is substantial. He held his first solo, ‘Colombedouin’, at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2014, and returned there for the two-person ‘Coast and Concrete’ in 2017; he has shown across successive editions of Colomboscope, at the Colombo Art Biennale in 2016, at the Karachi Biennale in 2019, and in the ‘Young Subcontinent’ project of the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, and he took up a Verzasca Foto residency in Switzerland in 2019.

What holds the practice together is the conviction that the large story of a country is legible in its least remarkable corners, and that the phone in a pocket is instrument enough to read it. He returns, again and again, to the same Colombo street, and asks it to give up what it knows.