IN THE NAME
Alaska Projects
April 4 - 26, 2015
I would sit with the yearlings, wiping snot from their nostrils and staring into their bulging yellow eyes, buried in the smell of wet wool. Facing death with a whispered prayer, those eyes glazed blue with a spasm of black shit and a spray of arterial red against the asbestos fence.
IN THE NAME invites you into the bright recesses of Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s childhood memories, when the scarcity of halal meat supplies brought animal slaughter and butchery into the suburban backyard. The pragmatic nature of life and death in the service of dinner became an unspoken ritual of the home, a bloody expression of the sacrosanct enacted behind closed doors. IN THE NAME explores the sense of duality embedded within the Muslim Australian experience, an innate understanding that axioms of the home tend to falter at the front door.
