This is the Aichi Triennale's own artist page for Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla, published to coincide with the festival's sixth edition, A Time Between Ashes and Roses, which opened on 13 September 2025 under artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi and runs until 30 November across venues in Nagoya, Seto and the Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum. It introduces Abdalla, born in Khorfakkan in 1989 and based in Abu Dhabi, as a multidisciplinary artist working across film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and performance.
The page describes her theatrical approach to painting, in which constructed characters confront folklore, mythology, gender and social conditioning at an objective distance. For the Triennale, shown at the Seto Ceramics and Glass Art Center, Abdalla presents a three-act painted cycle built around a dinosaur motif: a first act in which a woman gives birth to a dinosaur-faced child, a second exploring the tension between selfhood and motherhood, and a third in which the dinosaur grows monstrous as a symbol of guilt becoming overwhelming. The works are built up with dense layers of oil and acrylic applied by hand, with charcoal traced around her own figure.
The commission extends Abdalla's recent run of institutional showings, following her participation in Proximities at the Seoul Museum of Art and her continued representation by Tabari Artspace, and adds a major Japanese festival credit to a practice already shown at the Sharjah Biennial and in Basel.
