Grotesquely distorted figures move across seemingly surreal spaces. Human-animal hybrids appear engaged in fights, dances, and elusive mystical rites. Vast, ravaged landscapes, devoid of any human presence, stretch eerily into the horizon. Dreamlike. Fantastical. Uncanny.
Born in 1989 in Khorfakkan, Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla works across a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film, and performance. Her unique style is recognisable in her drawings and paintings through the use of expressive lines and brushwork, evoking the speed and emotion with which they were being applied onto the paper or canvas. In her sculptural works, films, and performances, her style translates through her deliberately warped and distorted figures, and their often dramatic gestures.
Across its many different media, the common feature in the artist’s work is a sense of theatricality. “I’ve always wanted to write, I know that I’m a storyteller,” she says, “I started reading a lot of film scripts [and] theatre plays [...] when I read something I could immediately imagine what it would look like for it to become a painting, or a performance, or a sculpture. So I started making my own, I started writing, creating characters, and writing things that looked like a script for a play or a theatre.”
Abdalla goes on to explain how she would perform her written work in her studio, merging writing with painting, performance, and other media, “I would basically perform [my scripts] in my studio and then move them into a painting, a sculpture, a film, or a performance. So I think why my work is very moving and dynamic and being referred to as very theatrical is because of the process that I use from creating the characters [to] moving them into different settings.”
For the artist, the process of creating the work has become a performance in itself, “I realised how my studio had become, in a way, the theatre. So the way I work, I do not like to sketch before painting, I like to give that kind of space for me to play with the canvas, with my body, with my fingers [...] so this is why the work is very theatrical. Even if sometimes it seems that it lacks the characters, like for example in my landscape paintings, the performers are always there, or were there, or are hidden somewhere in what seems like an empty forest.”
So what are Abdalla’s ‘plays’ about? Which stories and narratives are viewers presented with when contemplating her artworks?
The artist’s practice revolves around social constructs and cultural stereotypes, as well as themes and imagery of local folklore (her use of the pig and the rooster, motifs of sin and purity respectively, regularly appear in her work). Most often however, her work becomes a vessel for her own feelings, and particularly her emotional struggles around questions of morality, identity, and purpose.
“A lot of my work has to do with these extreme dualities of right and wrong and you have in the paintings spaces that are confined and other spaces that are forests and vast [...] a lot of the work is me, the characters, the landscapes, the confined spaces, the forests, they are a portrait of me,” she explains.
All of these elements are exemplified in Abdalla’s 2023 painting A Tree Falls I. A desolate forest landscape, composed of rough strokes of greyish-brown tones, lies beneath a tempestuous sky. Long black tree stumps appear to greet dark grey storm clouds approaching from the distance. In the foreground, a small blue lake, encircled by what could be read as green patches of grass and yellow foliage, introduces the idea of new life flourishing within the otherwise inhospitable landscape.
A Tree Falls I is part of a series of paintings the artist created during a residency in Paris, “I was extremely happy in Paris, but at the same time I wasn’t. I felt I was missing something. And something very strange happened to me. Every time I would close my eyes to sleep, my brain would imagine this space that I haven’t seen before and it’s this imaginative [place] somewhere in fields and forests.”
In speaking to a friend, who suggested that Abdalla’s recurring dream likely constituted a form of escapism and reclaiming control over her professional trajectory during a particularly demanding time in her career, she felt that she needed to translate this space onto the canvas, “I decided to paint these spaces [...] so the whole point of these paintings were like these moments of escapism, moments of running away, whether they were beautiful or dark, but those are spaces that are in my control.”
The title of the painting references a popular philosophical thought experiment, questioning whether, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. Adapting the question to her own work, Abdalla asks, “If you are screaming in a place where no one is paying attention to you, does your scream count?”
The artist holds a Bachelor in Visual Arts from Zayed University and has dedicated the last few years of her career to participating in residencies around the world, “that served me a lot in the way that, I would be out, I would be meeting people, not necessarily artists, but writers, musicians, poets. This is what gives me the stories, this is what inspires me [...] the people, the gatherings, the different cultures, the different stories.”
Reflecting on her work within the context of the rapid cultural development of the UAE, Abdalla says, “I feel excited. This is the place that I grew up in and a lot of my stories come from what I have lived here [...] to have the UAE as a hub for the art scene and excelling in the way that it’s excelling right now, is an amazing thing, because now you have people coming to the source to hear the stories, to look at the people, to come to our studios, to visit the artists, to see where the artists are coming from. So I think it’s incredible.”
Maitha Abdalla
Article courtesy of the Dubai Collection
