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. The series, Helianthus Calling, takes its title from the Greek genus name for sunflower, helios and anthos, the sunflower whose defining act is the turn toward light. Across the series, hybrid bodies and reclining figures gather around the bloom in landscapes of storm and night, the sunflower called toward and called by, a figure of orientation in the wider darkness. The body remains in transformation, here neither child nor adult, neither human nor animal, the dark and charged ground participating in the unsettlement.