Art & Object published an interview by Sarah Bochicchio on 12 April 2022 with Maitha Abdalla, built around her presentation for the Museum in the Sky exhibition and framed as a wider conversation about her artistic formation, from early attempts at novel writing through art-house cinema to a theatrical practice built on invented characters.
For Museum in the Sky, Abdalla showed Between Daydreams and Nightmares, part of her Scars by Daylight series - mixed-media paintings, photographs and installations examining the liminal space of adolescence - previously exhibited at Tabari Artspace in Dubai and at a London group show. Bochicchio describes Abdalla's recurring use of roosters and pigs as symbols drawn from Islamic tradition, standing respectively for purity and sin as a child moves toward adult accountability, and notes her habit of painting with her fingers and staging scenes in bathrooms to evoke private, bodily self-reflection. Abdalla names Francis Bacon and Paula Rego among her influences.
The interview is one of only two substantial written profiles of Maitha Abdalla found in her press file, tracing her Scars by Daylight series back through its first Dubai showing to the London group exhibition Beyond: Emerging Artists, and it remains a useful reference point alongside her later, larger-scale folktale paintings for anyone following her development as a storyteller across media.
