Authentic Narrative of The Curious Espionage of an Unnamed Moor

Artist and researcher Abdul Halik Azeez presents new research centred on the Institute of Consummate Memory (ICM), a museum in the distant future on New Serandip, a planet colonised by Sri Lankan Muslims.

While the work takes its point of departure from early 19th-century maritime activity in the Arabian Gulf, it also looks at the poetics of contemporary Gulf and South Asian infrastructures. Azeez connects these two moments, the fragile beginnings of colonial control and the hyper-connected logistics of the present, to explore how one might echo through the other.

In the early 1800s, the British Empire was still struggling to establish dominance across the Middle East and South Asia. By 1804, it had only a tenuous presence in India and Sri Lanka, and in the Gulf faced consistent attacks from those it labelled “pirates.” Interconnected trade networks, often led by Sri Lanka’s Moorish merchants, continually subverted colonial control. Through one incident in particular — the capture and subsequent release of R.W. Loane and company – Azeez speculates on alternative South–South alliances that might have reshaped history itself.

Within the speculative museum of the ICM, which archives everything from dreams to emotions, memories are extracted from the fossilised remains of a "native” from Loane's crew. These fragments form the uncertain ground from which history is re-told centuries later, from the perspective of the distant future. As the scanning progresses, the membranes of time begin to collapse. The infrastructures of the 21st-century Gulf and South Asia (ports, malls, skyscrapers, data cables, special economic zones) leak into the 19th-century seascape. The two eras start to read each other: colonial shipping routes resonate with new maritime corridors, ancient tribal affinities and modes of movement merge into modern forms of migration, and imperial ambitions mutate into contemporary forms of extraction and control.

Date: 22 November 2025

Time: 12PM 

Venue: WH51, Common Room, Alserkal Arts Foundation (Location Pin)

Presented as part of Fall 2025 Residency Open Studios.

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 to residencies and fellowships with the Delfina Foundation (2025), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2025-2026), Prince Claus Fund (2023) and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2022).

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