“In the middle of our walk of life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost”.
- Dante, The Divine Comedy
Emirati visual artist Maitha Abdalla will present a new body of work at the Asia Now art fair in Paris, 20-22 October 2023.
Maitha Abdalla is an interdisciplinary artist who utilises cultural narratives rooted in notions of nostalgia, memory and folklore to question the dynamics of power often represented in parables.
Taking inspiration from traditional storytelling across varied cultures, Abdalla approaches themes of social and political identity through the theatrical narratives constructed within her work. Conflating metaphors sourced from European and Emirati mythology, the artist intentionally blurs the distinctions between Eastern and Western perspectives, producing surreal tableaus that obscure the supposedly well-defined bounds of creative disciplines.
For Asia Now Abdalla will present a multi-disciplinary body of work across charcoal and oil on canvas as well as works on paper and an installation piece. This recent series was produced during the artist’s 12-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In this new work, the artist advances her prior thematic preoccupations, transcending from an exploration of the past—comprising childhood recollections and the collective narratives passed on to her by family members—toward a more introspective trajectory.
In these works, Abdalla has developed the forest into a central character in her compositions. The dark forest archetype, widely regarded as a symbol of the unconscious, looms prominently in children's fables, signifying the potential for peril, disorientation, or a passage to otherworldly realms. Abdalla appropriates this symbol to signify a journey through the forest—an odyssey in which she abandons her comfort zone yet never reaches her ultimate destination. Employing a weighty palette of dark tones, another shift from the vibrant pinks present in earlier works, the artist adeptly navigates parallel and conflicting sentiments of ecstasy and isolation, purpose and emptiness.
