Literature

Maitha Abdalla treats painting as a stage on which folklore, memory and the conditioning of the female body are confronted at an objective distance, the canvas inheriting the dramaturgical structures she has long deployed across film, photography and performance. Animals carry the conceptual weight of the practice, functioning as metaphors for the human and the different facets of the self, the hybrid creature standing for the wild and the watching. Her recent paintings see the figure released into storm-lit terrain. The body remains in transformation, neither child nor adult, neither human nor animal, the loaded ground participating in the unsettlement.