---

📁 maitha aliuk and uae

---

performance | multimedia art | research | art educationnetwork:

---

portfoliooooooooo i guess

(FAKE) REES ARE POLITICAL, TOO: uselessness and politicisation of the “technoflora” in downtown abu dhabi, 2024

---

creative masters dissertation; MSc in visual, material, and museum anthropology. university of oxford 

Abstract: This research project focalises telecommunication and cell towers, particularly those disguised as palm trees in Downtown Abu Dhabi. I argue that the telecom palm pole serves as a politicised and politicising vehicle in the urban space of Abu Dhabi, through its material transformations, constrained in the social environment, that lead to its conceptual transformations. This theoretical approach aims to empty the object (the telecom palm) of its pre-supposed meanings (Holbraad, 2014), tear it away from its clichés (Deleuze, 1989), and de-commodify it (Thoburn, 2014). To access this politicisation, I adopt assemblages as a methodological practice that highlight and analyse its evolving assemblages and their “contaminated diversity” (Luca, 1945; Tsing, 2015, p. 30). I collage/combine photographs taken during my fieldwork in three telecom pole sites, using field notes and sketches to supplement analysis on three themes: (1) the UAE’s spectacular image, (2) the haunting of public spaces by non-dominant narratives, and (3) the urban ecologies present and absent in Abu Dhabi. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the politicisation of an object is inseparable from its empirical ontology, and unearthing that highlights the radicalising role of academic intervention.



the series of digital collages are creative explorations of visual, material, and aesthetic implications of the telecom poles in and on its surrounding environment. 

1. interrupting monumentality (collage)
   
2. the haunting of found objects (collage)
   
3.  witnessing urban ecologies (collage)
   
   

---

you are currently viewing an experimental version of earth, 2023 

---

20 mins, multimedia five channel performance film


the first pop up message that appears in an old version of google earth is “you are currently viewing an experimental version of earth”, which exemplifiec maitha’s sense of simultaneous bewilderment and wonder  in urban settings. her fascination with telecommunication towers disguised as palm trees is a method through which she is able to express this paradoxical existence and existentialism in cities - feeling loneliness and solitude all at once. 

this experimental film anthropomorphizes four telecom palm trees/poles in abu dhabi through four acts, where they correspond with one another, contemplate their own existentialism and dwell upon their precarious futures.  

1. participation in “Spoon, Spade, Shovel”, jameel arts center (2025)
2. participation in “Data | Human”, alriwaq art space (2025)

• this film is a final project developed for the salama bint hamdan emerging artists fellowship (jan-nov 2023)
  

---

TECHNOFLORA, 2023-ongoing

---

photography


this photography series was the start of a two-year long (and still ongoing) investigation into the absurd and futuristic aesthetic of telecommunication towers in the united arab emirates. creating a visual and geolocational database of as many telecommunication towers disguised as palm trees as humanly possible. this photographic database is now a fruitful pool of resources through which maitha is experimenting with film, collage, and multimedia art. 

1. rotten, al bateen
   
2. wires, corniche
3. rusted, marina island
   
4. renovate? family park 
   
5. rancid, family park
   

---

carefully and cleverly, 2024 

---

21 minutes, multimedia essay reading/performance

this  reading is of one of three essays in a forthcoming nonfiction book, the product of a two-year research grant for the project “domesticity of wanderers”. supported by alserkal arts foundation, this research project uses autoethnographic and creative visual methods to tread and sift through stories of ajaminess and migration across the arab/persian gulf. borrowing from historical knowledge on the ethnic group known as “the hawala”, defined as “the wanderers” or “those who transform”, it asks the question of how/whether ajami identity, in all the movements of its people, is preserved and encapsulated in the domestic space.

this essay, titled “carefully and cleverly” speaks to the tensions and violent collisions of disclosing private and domestic migratory histories to a public space where these stories were previously rejected or erased. it challenges possibilities of academic and institutional instrumentalization through employing tactile tools of concealing viusal content in family archives, inviting the audience to consider reversible consent in storytelling.

this piece was performed at the research convening “domestic departures: (im)mobility, loss, and resilience in an uncertain world” in alserkal avenue in dubai, uae. november 2024. 


photographs by nino consorte / seeing things. domestic departures: (im)mobility, loss and resilience in an uncertain world. research convening 2024, alserkal arts foundation.

---

domesticity of wanderers: audience intervention publication, feb 2024

---

multimedia publication series

following the essay reading of “carefully, cleverly” as part of the research convening for the project “domesticity of wanderers”, the audience delved into a 30-minute discussion on the risks of precarity and protection of identities and histories, especially when met with a public audience. a very lively discussion was sustained by the artist’s initiative to offer people three long scrolls wrapping around the performance space. these scrolls served as a physical space for audience members to contribute their learnings from the research convening, and they were filled with content, materials, and reflections. 

this audience intervention project is now being turned into a publication through scanning the scrolls (16.54 x 1968.5 inches) and turning them into smaller scrolls to be turned into accordion books. this is scheduled to be printed and launched in february 2025 with the same public audience that contributed to the walls.

---

oxford fatigue, 2024

---

instagram memes, published under the account @oxfordfatigue. 

---

al raheel | departure, 2022 & 2022

---

lead actor in world premiere and remount

written by reem al menhali
directed by joanna settle

commissioned by the nyuad art center and abu dhabi cultural foundation, performed at the nyuad art center. 

---

if i have to read the clash of civilizations? one more time i will lose my mind, 2021

---

2:49, video with sound

this piece laments maitha’s experience of oscillating between her familial and collective spaces back in sharjah, uae and the academic spaces she is a part of at oxford. The placement of samuel huntington’s 1993 text that politicizes and essentializes the “Islamic civilization” over a playful, inaudible conversation with her family members produces a contrast meant to feel jarring in the way it criticizes and implicitly rejects western-centric perceptions of the artist’s and her family’s culture and socio-political context.

---

goat house, 2021

---

2:42 min, video with sound


this experimental performance situated in the artist’s maternal grandmother’s goat house is overlaid with two bodies of text: a transcribed conversation between her father and his mother, and an amalgamation of different definitions of the root word ajam. the conversation about ‘ajamis’ plight from iran, conveyed in an ajami emirati vernacular from the grandmother and an emirati dialect from the father, aesthetically frames maitha’s isolated and curious physical exploration of the goat house as the sun sets outside. the definitions of ajam, in fus’ha (formal, i.e., “correct”) arabic, appear in a disorderly fashion, bombarding the explorative process in the same way that non-ajami perceptions of ajaminess have shaken their narratives and histories.

2. participation in “Proximities” exhibition at seoul nuseum of art (2025-ongoing)