Abdul Halik Azeez Mentorship Awards recipient

Abdul Halik Azeez is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer based in Sri Lanka. Abdul’s artistic practice delves into the interplay among technologies of power, contemporary culture, lived experiences, and media. His practice predominantly draws from post-war transformations that have impacted his country, such as the effects of gentrification, economic crises, tourism, and renewed ultranationalist politics. Through ethnographic interventions and the sampling of diverse archives, Abdul juxtaposes and remixes, tracing cosmologies that attempt to connect that which otherwise cannot be connected.

In 2019, along with artist and curator Sandev Handy, Abdul co-founded The Packet: a collective of emerging artists from Sri Lanka committed to hyper-locality, playfulness and collaborative process. He is also currently, along with Berlin-based musician Jackie Poloni, co-organizing “Wet Land”, a three-year project bringing together artists from Sri Lanka, Switzerland and Pakistan into conversations around approaches to artistic research.