YUNG published Multi-Media Artist Maitha Abdalla on Her Surreal Storytelling, a feature by Mariana Baão Santos, on 4 June 2024. Santos describes a studio that becomes a stage and a practice in which the paintbrush becomes an extension of self: the Emirati artist, she writes, does not simply create art but inhabits it, weaving stories of identity, memory and tradition through painting, sculpture and performance.
The feature traces Abdalla's lifelong love of stories, from narratives written as a child to characters that leapt off the page into sculpture, painting and performance. Asked what power means to her, she answers simply: "I think being able to feel." Santos explains that Abdalla embraces the full spectrum of emotion, finding creative energy in sadness as well as joy, while rejecting the romantic idea of the suffering artist. In her early twenties, Abdalla says, she discovered cinema and theatre, attending film festivals and then reading the scripts of films she loved. That shift led her from novels and short stories to writing scenes, like a bridge from words to visuals, and now the story often becomes a theatrical performance with characters before it becomes a painting.
Born in Khorfakkan in 1989, Maitha Abdalla works across film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance, using the constructed character of the theatre to explore folklore, mythology, gender and psychology in scenes charged with drama and melancholy. She is represented by Tabari.
