By now, most observant members of the Stanford community will have noticed the advertising flyer for artist Faisal Abdu’Allah’s on-campus exhibition. Against a white background, the advertisement depicts a figure standing in profile, gazing down the barrel of a gun pointed directly out into the space of the viewer. Unsettling to the point of alarm, the flyer announces Abdu’Allah’s exhibition “The Art of Dislocation.”

And dislocation is definitely the operative word here. One cannot escape the feeling that the urban violence and gang culture that the flyer signifies could not be farther removed from the reality of our pristine, suburban campus. Yet it is this sense of dislocation, this out-of-context quality, which makes “The Art of Dislocation” particularly provocative and exciting to see here at Stanford.

“The Art of Dislocation” opened on Sept. 28 in the Thomas Welton Art Gallery, the on-campus art gallery adjacent to the History Corner. As a retrospective of Abdu’Allah’s career, the exhibition features work produced by the artist over the last 20 years and is the most comprehensive display of his work to date. Stanford represents the first of three stops for this internationally touring exhibition, which will continue to the Frost Art Museum in Miami before concluding in the United Kingdom. For the London-based Abdu’Allah, the U.K. exhibition will be a return home, as the artist himself has been dislocated for the quarter to teach as Stanford’s Artist-In-Residence. In fact, as the exhibition catalog states, this show is the first of a black British artist on Stanford’s campus. As such, “The Art of Dislocation” makes up for lost time in the strong statements on race, masculinity and community that the exhibition represents.

Upon entering the gallery’s lobby, one gets the impression that the confrontational flyer that solicited entrance into the exhibition was simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of the charged quality of Abdu’Allah’s work. The viewer is “greeted” by “Goldfingers” (2007), which consists of a gold-plated pistol and knuckleduster displayed under a vitrine typical of museum display. One cannot deny the beauty of these golden objects, but the pernicious consequences that the weapons index are equally impossible to ignore. As such, these objects epitomize preciousness at a price.

In a similar manner throughout the exhibition, Abdu’Allah masterfully aligns a formal beauty of alluring surfaces and materials with highly charged content addressing questions of race, religion, violence and their intersection.

In large part because of the expectation garnered by the publicity flyer, upon entering the larger gallery space, my attention was immediately directed toward Abdu’Allah’s “I Wanna Kill Sam ‘Cause He Ain’t My Motherfucking Uncle” (1993). Running the entire length of the right gallery wall, the work consists of five separate aluminum prints, beautifully spotlit from above, each depicting a life-size black man dressed in stereotypically gang-related clothing. The figure from the flyer is here, pointing his gun from the middle of the composition while flanked on both sides by four equally threatening figures carrying a gun, baseball bat or knife – or, in the case of one of the figures, all three.
Further, though the title references the rapper Ice Cube’s song “I Wanna Kill Sam,” the central figure additionally calls to mind the familiar iconography of Uncle Sam posters. However, Abdu’Allah turns this reference point on its head. In contrast to a pointing symbol of patriotism, the pointing gun of the work’s central figure indicts and implicates both the viewer and “The Man.”

This sense of skepticism in relation to traditional systems of power and “justice” is also reflected in the earliest of the works on display here, Abdu’Allah’s 1991 “Fuck da Police.” In this work, the repeated phrase “fuck da police” cascades down the surface of the print, a chorus of obscenities etched atop an image of an isolated black man. Through both text and image, the work mines the feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement experienced by the black community following the infamous L.A. police brutality against Rodney King.

In continuing around the gallery, two of Abdu’Allah’s photographic series take up religious themes as their focus, “Last Supper” (1996) and “Revelations” (1996). In the latter, five photographic portraits place the viewer uncomfortably close to Abdu’Allah’s reimagination of Christ as a black messiah. Inches from this figure’s face, the high-resolution photographs make palpable the tactile difference between the figure’s skin, the crown of thorns adorning his head and the blood rushing down his face.

Of note, the entirety of the large interior gallery space is open, as all of the works on display are mounted on the gallery walls. In moving through the gallery space, an unsettling reality became apparent to me: The two eyes of the central figure in “Uncle Sam,” as well as his wielded pistol, which itself becomes a threatening third eye, follow the viewers, regardless of where they stand. As a result of the open inner space of gallery, we are left constantly under surveillance with nowhere to hide.

It was only after walking closer to the “Uncle Sam” prints that I realized that instead of solid forms, the figures are comprised of groupings of smaller, discernable dots. As a result, instead of reinscribing the trope of aggressive black masculinity, Abdu’Allah seems to be breaking down these stereotypes. What one thinks of as a solid or fixed perception dematerializes upon closer inspection of the representation. In the end, the images, like a stereotype itself, are simply surface and veneer.