Literature

Emirati multi-disciplinary artist Maitha Abdalla’s practice combines film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance. In all techniques she approaches, she allows a dominant position to the bodies, either anthropomorphic or hybrid. She stages those figures in fantastic environments and in situations evoking fights and conflicts. The ensemble is similar to a personal cosmogony, crossing themes ranging from folklore and mythology to social conditioning, gender and psychology. For the artist, theater is a space where she can confront, place at an objective distance some situations which she has encountered in her social environment, her memories and fantasies. Scenes composed by the artist are sometimes illustrative and explicit, sometimes more abstract, two fields in which she distills an atmosphere tinged with melancholy. Maitha Abdalla’s art forms an ongoing investigation into the self. She constructs characters that embody a distinct entity from her persona often constrained within tight domestic spaces that exposes their vulnerability.