The Financial Times ran "UAE becomes an incubator to help careers of local emerging artists" on 21 November 2020, written by Nadine Khalil. The piece examines how a younger generation of Emirati artists began building their own infrastructure — studios, residencies, selling platforms — at a point when artists in the UAE still could not rent studio space without a commercial licence.
Khalil traces that shift through Bait 15, the artist-run studio in Abu Dhabi founded in 2017 by Maitha Abdalla together with Afra Al Dhaheri and Hashel Al Lamki, in what had been the home of the painter and filmmaker Mohamed Al Mazrouei. The article describes Bait 15 as holding an exhibition area, a library, a residency and four studio spaces, and notes its hosting of 101, an inaugural sale for artists without gallery representation. Hashel Al Lamki is then picked out as a rising artist on the strength of his first solo exhibition, The Cup and the Saucer at Warehouse421, which Khalil describes as delving into nostalgia, pop culture, waste and the relations between personal and collective histories, through large-scale paintings and anthropomorphic assemblages built from pharmaceutical boxes, pistachios, bicycle locks and hair clips.
The article catches both artists at the grassroots stage that preceded their gallery careers. Maitha Abdalla and Hashel Al Lamki are both now represented by Tabari Artspace, and the self-organised model the FT documented — artists making space for one another before institutions did — remains the ground their later museum and biennial work grew from.
