Becoming Her Own Place of Return
Written by Soraya
On October 22, the night before the seventh MENART Fair opened its doors in Paris, Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla became the first recipient of the Coup de Cœur Boucheron. She received it alongside the unveiling of Hug My Land*, a bronze woman folded into her own arms, made in answer to the question the fair has set itself this year: Where is Home?*
On the body as a stage
Maitha Abdalla was born in Sharjah in 1989, and she has never settled on a single medium. She paints, sculpts, draws, makes films and photographs, and performs. What ties it together is theatre. Her images are staged the way a play is staged: built, lit, peopled with figures who seem to be acting out something they cannot quite say.
Those figures are most often women, and they are most often indoors. Rooms, corridors, domestic interiors that look familiar at first glance. Stay with them a little longer and the familiarity starts to give. There is constraint in these spaces, and also the possibility of getting out. Abdalla works in pairs of opposites — reality and fiction, childhood and adulthood, the house and the animal instinct that the house is supposed to keep in check — and lets them rub against each other until the scene becomes something closer to a psychological landscape than a picture of a room.
Folklore and myth run underneath all of it. So do memory, ritual and the quieter question of how a body absorbs where it comes from: the habits it is taught, the belonging it is given, the conditioning it carries without noticing. Abdalla moves freely between Eastern and Western archetypes, and refuses to say which is which. The result is a body of work that is often melancholic and always charged, populated by figures caught halfway through a transformation. The body is both her subject and her material.
That language has travelled. Abdalla has shown at the Sharjah Biennial 15, in the UAE National Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, at the Lyon Biennale, the Aichi Triennale 2025 and the Seoul Museum of Art. Last year, the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi gave her a solo exhibition, Between Metamorphosis and Reality. She is now working on a large project about the identities of Muslim women around the world, due in 2027.
Hug my land
On Hug My Land
Hug My Land is a bronze, roughly a metre tall. A woman sits collapsed into herself, her body folding and turning as her arms wrap around her own frame. It is hard to tell whether she is falling or holding herself together. Probably both.
Abdalla conceived the work in the shadow of recent tensions across the Gulf, and it began with a simple, almost childlike impulse: to put your arms around the land when it feels fragile, to hold on to home. Somewhere in the making, the embrace turned inward. The land stopped being out there. Home, in this sculpture, is no longer an address or a place to return to. It is something the body keeps.
“This work evokes an almost bodily relationship to the land: what it transmits to us, what we project onto it, and what we continue to carry within us when we move away,” Abdalla says.
The figure also reads as a mother, the body we associate with origin, shelter and memory. But the shelter she offers is not for anyone else. In her collapse, she becomes the one looking for refuge and the refuge at once. The sculpture is the first piece of a wider body of work; its story continues in a series of paintings to be shown at the Boucheron apartment in Paris.
Laure d'Hauteville, Hélène Poulit-Duquesne, Maitha Abdalla
On a first Coup de Cœur
Boucheron has partnered with MENART Fair since 2024, the year the fair gave an entire edition over to women artists. The Coup de Cœur is the Maison’s way of taking that commitment a step further. Each year it will single out one woman artist from the Middle East and North Africa and help carry her work to a wider international audience. Abdalla was chosen, the Maison says, for her creative freedom, the singularity of her perspective and her rigour.
Hélène Poulit-Duquesne, Boucheron’s CEO, presented the award herself at the vernissage. “With the Coup de Cœur Boucheron, we want to celebrate women artists who create without compromise, challenge conventions, and invite us to look at the world differently,” she said. “In ‘Hug My Land’, she delivers a work deeply rooted in her country’s heritage, yet carrying a message that resonates far beyond.”
The prize sits within a longer line of patronage. Under creative director Claire Choisne, whose Carte Blanche collections each July test what preciousness can mean, the Place Vendôme house has built its own arts platform, Boucheron Curation. Since 2018 it has partnered with Yishu 8 on an annual residency for three artists at the Maison des Arts in Beijing, opposite the Forbidden City. Since 2025 it has also supported the Her Art Prize, co-founded with Marie Claire and Art Paris to give women artists more visibility.
On Where is Home?
Laure d’Hauteville founded MENART Fair in 2021, and it remains the only fair in Europe devoted entirely to modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa. It returns to Paris every year with galleries and artists from the region and its diasporas, and it has made a point of putting women and emerging names at the front. This year’s theme, Where is Home?, asks participating artists to think about home, sanctuary and belonging against a background of shifting borders and displacement.
For d’Hauteville, the overlap between Abdalla and the Maison lies in “a shared focus on identity, transmission, and creative freedom; a shared belief that heritage truly comes alive when it charts new territories.”
It is a big question for a fair, and Abdalla’s answer is a small, private one. Home may not always be somewhere we find our way back to. Sometimes, her bronze suggests, we have to become our own place of return.
The seventh edition of MENART Fair runs in Paris from October 23 to 25, 2026.
Words copyright of Naso Art Journal
Images courtesy of Maitha Abdulla
