I have a visceral memory of crouching among the hanging shirts in a wardrobe as a small child in Dubai. Its wooden back falls away, and I am transported, not to the pink-tiled bathroom on the other side, but to fantastical worlds. In one, I’m clutching a helium balloon as it floats to the ceiling, with tiny me hovering several feet off the ground. I know that in reality these things couldn’t have happened, but they feel so intensely real all the same. Maitha Abdalla’s show “Scars by Daylight,” which traces the quiet irreality of growing up in the United Arab Emirates, conjures similar sensations: not so much a whimsical reverie as a claustrophobic fever dream.
In this show, Emirati folklore and a medieval European bestiary walk into a cosmetics store, and things only get weirder from there. In the photograph Allure, 2020, a young woman in a green micro-floral-print dress poses with some papier-mâché roosters against a wall tiled in Pepto-Bismol pink. In Islam, roosters are said to crow when they see an angel; hearing one is a prompt to ask Allah for forgiveness. But one imagines these roosters are silent, for the woman wears a tired-eyed pig mask, the kind you might more commonly see at an anti-corporate or police brutality protest. The image is hung behind a clear shower curtain in a cross section of a bathroom tiled the same shade in an interrupted mise en abyme. Next to it, a rain showerhead is installed above a knee-height sink with sculpted claw-foot legs—ready for ablution, if not absolution.
Read More
