Dancing Stills is the title of this work by Maitha Abdalla.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Tabari Artspace, Dubai, has just concluded the solo exhibition titled Scars by Daylight (June 2 – 15) at Cromwell Place, London, by Emirati mixed-media artist, Maitha Abdalla. It took place in parallel with Abu Dhabi Art’s group show Beyond: Emerging Artists, at the same location. Abdalla’s exhibition continues at Tabari Artspace, Dubai, till September 30.

For her solo, Abdalla has produced a body of work across varied mediums, which interrogates the gravity and uncertainty of the in-between years of adolescence.

Tradition, transformation and paradox are at the core of this work, as are elements in individual transitions from youth to adulthood, including shifting in outer appearance, social status and identity.

Abdalla perceives this formative and liminal time in our lives to be a dream-like moment, where fantasy and reality conflate. She draws on regional folktales and faith-based traditions and mythologies, and animals are a recurring symbol throughout her practice: most commonly, the pig and the rooster.

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For Abdalla, the rooster is a creature of purity that embodies forgiveness and innocence while the pig is its opposing force, understood to be sinful in Islam. In the context of her art, the duality represents the moment when one leaves childhood when young adults harbour no responsibility for their actions and their passage into adulthood — a place with newfound responsibility and autonomy.

Inspired by theatre, fantasy, tradition and ritual, there is always a performative element in Abdalla’s art. Working across mediums, she has produced several compositions on canvas, a series of photographs and an installation for the exhibition. When painting, Abdalla typically uses her fingers — a process rooted in intimate expression and the transmission of her energy onto the canvas.

She draws from the likes of Francis Bacon, following his unabashed portrayal of the human condition and Paula Rego, who captured corrupted folklore through her magical realist paintings. Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included cruxifixions, self-portraits and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures.

 Day Dreamer, installation by Maitha Abdalla.

Rejecting various classifications of his work, he said he strove to render “the brutality of fact.” He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style. Rego is a Portuguese-born visual artist, who is particularly known for her paintings and prints based on storybooks.

Like Bacon, Abdalla’s palette is often muted, pointing to the darkness and multifaceted meanings that her childhood folktales come to embody, while her introduction of pastel pink holds kitsch, gendered connotations.

Her scenes take place in intimate, indoor settings, where personal dreams and angst might act. The bathroom is the backdrop for her installations and photographs. For Abdalla, it is a space where cleansing and grooming rituals, as well as self-reflection, take place and where the idea of adolescent transformation is pronounced most intensely, with the body laid bare before the mirror.

Abdalla discovered her passion for arts at an early age; however, it was through Art and Design courses in London at Middlesex University, that her understanding of art gained depth. She went on to gain a BA in Visual Arts from the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University. As if harnessing the subconscious, her work oscillates between the diaphanous, vibrant and surreal, and is always marked by an atmosphere of reminiscence and nostalgia. Often evolving into series articulating strong cultural narratives, her paintings and mixed media works are assemblages of memory, travel and human interactions. Informed by exchanges and experiences, her socially driven commentaries on the human condition reveal astute, intuitive observations on the world around her in a narrative form.

A particularly influential encounter was with children at an orphanage where she taught English and art. The motifs of childhood began to permeate her work after this time, becoming an eloquent vernacular in which she further explores the difference between the imaginary and the real; mapping the liminal space between these interconnected worlds, she reels out many questions of social and cultural identity.

She is a graduate of The Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, in partnership with the Rhode Island School of Design, and is also one of the founders of BAIT 15, a recently opened and artist-run gallery and studio in Abu Dhabi, which plays an active role in the contemporary art scene in the UAE. It is an artist run studio and exhibition space located in a residential neighbourhood of downtown Abu Dhabi, founded in 2017 by Afra Al Dhaheri, Hashel Al Lamki, and Abdalla.

The villa housing BAIT includes studios, one for each of the members, a dedicated studio for the use of visiting artists, and an exhibition space. The founders have disparate studio practices encompassing a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, digital media, and performance. The idea was conceived from a shared need for studio space and a mutual desire to establish an artist-run gallery. By being artist-managed and funded, BAIT’s mission is open and flexible, and can continuously adapt to the emerging art scene of the UAE. It aims to be a crossing point between production and exhibition, continuing the artistic tradition, locally and internationally, situated in spaces and discourses of the artists’ own making.  Abdalla has participated in Abu Dhabi Festival 2019 Visual Arts Residency Programme in Vaduz, Liechtenstein and Vienna, Austria.