Maitha Demithan
United Arab Emirates
Maitha Demithan works across photography, scanography, drawing, painting and photo transfer to weave together scans of her Emirati community, traditional cultural imagery and contemporary practice. In perfecting the technique of using a flatbed printer to take multiple images of her subjects, Demithan combines the mechanical with the emotional in her deconstructed portraits.
Based in Dubai, Maitha’s first drawings were sketched in the sand, which formed an appreciation for colour, texture, line and shadow. Maitha’s work has appeared in various exhibitions including her solo show ‘Mutajadid’ (Tashkeel, 2014), which included experimental installations and new media pieces, as well as in ‘Documentation’ (Tashkeel, 2009) where her first scanned self-portraits appeared and ‘Across the Gulf’ (Brisbane Biennial, 2009). Other group shows include ‘Emerge’ (Venice, 2011), ‘Emirati Vision’ (Berlin, 2009) and ‘Biladi’ at the UAE Pavilion, EXPO 2010 Shanghai.
“…Emirati artist Maitha Demithan, by contrast, has used flatbed scans of people’s bodies and knitted them together digitally to produce images of her community in the United Arab Emirates….”Andrew Stephens, The Age
