Talk
8 October 2025
Stranger in a Strange Land
Film presentation & conversation with our Fall 2025 resident Abdul Halik Azeez
Warehouse 50, Project Space
For the first public programme of our Fall 2025 residency, we’ll watch Stranger in a Strange Land, a film by Abdul Halik Azeez, followed by a conversation with writer Deepak Unnikrishnan.
In Stranger in a Strange Land, artist Abdul Halik Azeez charts the overlooked histories of Sri Lankan Muslims through the lens of recollection and fabulation. Confronted with the absence of formal documentation, he turns to oral narratives, family photo albums, found media, and fragments of popular culture to construct a layered account of selfhood.
The film traces the neoliberal shifts of the 1970s and the dual civil wars that reshaped Sri Lanka from the 1980s onward, set against labour migration to the Middle East, rising religiosity, the spectacle of South Indian cinema, audio and video recordings from family members, and the artist’s own influences such as heavy metal music. By casting intimate memories within broader geopolitical frameworks, Azeez situates lived experience against histories of transformation, and in doing so, challenges monolithic narratives of Muslim identity.
Bio:
Abdul Halik Azeez is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A multidisciplinary artist and organiser, his work explores relationships between colonialism, late capitalism, memory/history making, and identity politics. Halik has a MA in Linguistics from the University of Granada, and an MA in Financial Economics from the University of Colombo. He spent many years practicing as a journalist, economist, and Critical Discourse Analyst before turning to art practice full time. He is co-founder of The Packet, a collective formed in 2019. He has exhibited at the Asia Pacific Triennial (2024), Videobrasil (2023), Berlinale (2023) and documenta fifteen (2022), and received invitations to residencies and fellowships with the Delfina Foundation (2025), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2025-2026), Prince Claus Fund (2023) and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2022).
Deepak Unnikrishnan is a writer from Abu Dhabi. His award-winning Temporary People, a work of fiction about Gulf narratives steeped in Malayalee and South Asian lingo, set the base for his latest project, ‘Pettee’, a dance piece co-written and co-directed with the writer Karthika Naïr, composer Sarathy Korwar, and other movement-makers. He is an Associate Arts Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has two more books in him, no more.
Photo: Still from Stranger in a Strange Land (2024)