Cultured's Janelle Zara used the 2021 edition of Abu Dhabi Art's Beyond: Emerging Artists programme, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, to argue that Abu Dhabi's cultural identity is being reshaped by a younger generation working alongside the emirate's museum-building on Saadiyat Island. The piece profiles the three artists given budgets and curatorial support that year: the American-Emirati artist Christopher Joshua Benton, whose installation The World Was My Garden linked date cultivation to forced labour and race and class in the Gulf and California, and two Tabari Artspace artists, Hashel Al Lamki and Maitha Abdalla.
Zara describes Maitha Abdalla as an Emirati artist whose practice explores female empowerment, the straddling of multiple worlds and an embrace of wild tendencies. Her installation for the programme, Too Close to the Sun, is characterised as surrealist, drawing on the folkloric imagery of Arab legends alongside more mundane memories of adolescence. Hashel Al Lamki's contribution, NEPTUNE, is discussed in the same terms of return: an installation about the pull back towards a nomadic Bedouin way of life amid the region's industrial development.
As a survey piece rather than a review, the article does not go further into materials or dates, but it captures the moment both artists' Beyond commissions first put them in wider cultural-affairs coverage of Abu Dhabi. For Maitha Abdalla, it sits alongside the same programme's own listing on Tabari Artspace's site, Beyond Emerging Artists, Abu Dhabi Art.
