How does daydreaming, fantasy, myth-making and childhood nostalgia impact creativity? In what ways does fantasy reinforce an understanding of our realities? How much of this impacts your artwork production? Is it a constant part of your thought process?

In this episode of “Whistle While You Work”, Suzy Sikorski discusses these questions and more with artists Maitha Abdalla and Hassan Meer.

Maitha Abdalla

Maitha discovered her passion for arts at an early age, however it was through art and design courses in London that her understanding of art had flourished. She went on to gain a BA in visual arts from the college of arts and creative enterprises at Zayed University.

As if harnessing the subconscious, Maitha Abdalla’s work oscillates between the diaphanous, vibrant and surreal, and is always marked by an atmosphere of reminiscence and nostalgia. Often evolved into series articulating strong cultural narratives, her paintings and mixed media works are assemblages of memory, travel and human interactions. Informed by exchanges and experiences, her socially driven commentaries on the human condition reveal astute, intuitive observations on the world around her, in a narrative form. Theatre is particularly influential in her work, as she further explores the difference between the imaginary and the real; mapping the liminal space between these interconnected worlds, she plays out many questions of social and cultural identity.

Hassan Meer

Hassan Meer was born in Muscat the capital city of the Sultanate of Oman, where he continues to live and work. He received his Masters degree in Art with Media Art specialization in 1999 from Savannah College of art and design, Georgia, USA. During his study, he started using video and installation art as a new form to express his ideas, which have been inspired by personal experience and childhood memories with an impressionable sense of spirituality. In the year 2000 he organized the Circle Show, which, is taking the lead in encouraging this new form of art in Oman and the region. Hassan is very much inspired by the changes in culture identity and he studies individual identity, community correlates in relation to a collective experience and a globalized age through his installation works and artworks. His work is also a contemplation and search into the spiritual domain and the magic rituals bequeathed to us from ancient times which, has established itself profoundly in our society. It narrates his pondering and questioning of death, the mortality of man and examines others local prevalent rituals.

As part of Warehouse421 Conversations, "Whistle While You Work" is a series of discussions led by Suzy Sikorski of MidEast Art, dedicated to humanizing the artist and embracing the diverse interdisciplinary activities, thoughts, and frame of minds that have been birthed or accelerated during this time in the pandemic.

Faced with a heightened sense of awareness of their emotional and technical functions during the quarantine, artists and creatives from across the GCC share their newfound ideas, paying attention to their mental and physical processes.

Suzy Sikorski is an art researcher in Dubai running Mid East Art, a digital storytelling platform covering modern art analysis and contemporary practices. The platform’s overarching emphasis seeks not only to contextualize the contemporary within regional modern art history, but also in bridging both Western and Middle Eastern audiences and thinking critically within global art historical discourse.