Ocula published Nadine Khalil's profile Maitha Abdalla's Storytelling Invokes Lynch, Dzama, and Emirati Folklore on 4 August 2021, written as the Emirati artist's solo exhibition Scars by Daylight was on view at Tabari in DIFC. Khalil examines a practice that moves between painting, photography, installation and performance, and reads its theatrical, dreamlike staging alongside the films of David Lynch and the hybrid figures of the Canadian artist Marcel Dzama.
The profile traces Abdalla's imagery to Emirati folklore and to stories and beliefs passed down by her grandmother, including the animal symbolism that recurs in the show: roosters, associated with angels and forgiveness, and pigs, associated with sin. Khalil discusses paintings such as The Silence in Carnivals (2021), a large canvas of masked figures and hybrid beings, Scarred by Silenced Nightmares (2021), Tomorrow Is Still Another Day, with its beaked human figure, and Dancing Stills, a forest scene overlaid with a grid that recalls bathroom tiles. Abdalla describes the forest setting as giving "the illusion of the dream and the feeling of being lost and free."
Scars by Daylight was among Abdalla's first solo exhibitions with Tabari, and the vocabulary Khalil identifies, of hybrid creatures, staged domestic spaces and folktales half remembered from childhood, has continued through her later work, including INT. The Body, Sunrise at Cromwell Place in London and her presentation at the Aichi Triennale in Japan. Her work is held by the Guggenheim and Barjeel Art Foundation. She is represented by Tabari.
