Naso Art Journal's portrait of Maitha Abdalla, subtitled Becoming Her Own Place of Return, follows the Emirati artist to Paris, where she received the first Coup de Cœur Boucheron at MENART Fair.
The award was presented on 22 October 2026, the night before the seventh MENART Fair opened, alongside the unveiling of Hug My Land, a bronze about a metre tall made in answer to the fair's question, Where is Home? The journal describes a woman collapsed into herself, arms wrapped around her own frame, so that it is hard to tell whether she is falling or holding herself together. Conceived amid recent tensions across the Gulf as an embrace of the land, the work turned inward: home became something the body keeps.
The piece reads Abdalla's practice through theatre. Born in Sharjah in 1989, she paints, sculpts, draws, makes films and photographs and performs, staging women in interiors where familiarity gives way to constraint and the possibility of escape, with folklore, memory and ritual running beneath. It lists her shows at Sharjah Biennial 15, the UAE National Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, the Aichi Triennale 2025, the Seoul Museum of Art and her solo exhibition at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi.
Boucheron's chief executive presented the award at the vernissage, and MENART founder Laure d'Hauteville speaks of a shared focus on identity and creative freedom. Maitha Abdalla is represented by Tabari.
