Abdullah Qureshi

ABDULLAH QURESHI

Photo: by Hammas Wali

Abdullah Qureshi (b. 1987, Lahore) is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. Rooted in traditions of abstraction, he incorporates gestural, poetic, and hybrid methodologies to address autobiography, trauma, and sexuality through painting, filmmaking, and immersive events.

Drawing from childhood memories, everyday surroundings, and intimate encounters, interior objects, abstract landscapes, and faceless portraits are recurring themes in his two-dimensional work. In moving image and durational projects, Qureshi situates artistic concerns from the personal into more expansive conversations on critical histories, visual culture, and social justice. His films take a camp performance-based approach to portray scenes, symbols, and non-linear narratives that extend his visual language, questions on identity, and queer genealogies outside the Western canon.

Through curating, cultural programming, pedagogy, and writings, Qureshi works with long-term collaborators, further articulating his inquiries in feminist, LGBTIQ2S+, decolonial, anti-racist, and migratory discourses. Centring Black and People of Color perspectives, he engages collective modes of creative thinking, organization, and production. Through his ongoing doctoral project, Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias, he examines formations of queer identity and resistance in Muslim migratory contexts.

Qureshi's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Gallery of Art, Islamabad, Alhamra Art Gallery, Lahore, Rossi & Rossi, London, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, and SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco. He has held numerous positions at cultural and educational institutions, including the British Council Pakistan and the National College of Arts, Lahore. Qureshi has conducted lectures, paper readings, and artist talks around the world, including at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), Prague, Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, PRAKSIS, Oslo, Residency Unlimited, New York, University of California, Irvine, Valand Academy, Gothenburg, and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana. In 2017, Qureshi received the Art and International Cooperation fellowship at Zurich University of the Arts and, in 2018, a research fellowship at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, Boston. In 2019, he joined the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Toronto as a visiting graduate student.

Qureshi is a Doctoral Candidate at Aalto University, Espoo, and Lecturer in Fine Art: Contemporary Practices at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.