Maitha Abdalla makes her debut at the Aichi Triennale 2025 in Japan, one of Asia’s most vital contemporary art platforms. This sixth edition, staged across Nagoya and Seto, is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, whose artistic direction draws its title and spirit from Adonis’s 1970 poem A Time Between Ashes and Roses. “Are humans decomposing nature or is nature decomposing humans?” Al Qasimi asks. “Are there clear distinctions between the interior, psychological human, and the exterior, botanical world?”
The Triennale takes these provocations as a curatorial compass, dismantling rigid binaries - between ruin and bloom, interior and exterior, human and environment - and opening a space for art to imagine what lies in between. Within this framework, Abdalla presents a series of paintings that hover between the mythic and the surreal. Her works probe the fragile seam where inner worlds collide with social structures, evoking ritual and archetype to question humanity’s shifting place within ecological cycles.