Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla has received Boucheron’s inaugural Coup de Cœur recognition at MENART FAIR in Paris, an award spotlighting a woman artist from the Middle East and North Africa whose work combines a distinctive perspective with creative freedom.
Boucheron chief executive Hélène Poulit-Duquesne presented the distinction on 22 October at the vernissage of Hug My Land. The recognition accompanies the seventh edition of MENART FAIR, running from 23 to 25 October 2026, and builds on the French jewellery maison’s partnership with the fair, which began in 2024.
A Body That Becomes a Place of Refuge
At the heart of Abdalla’s presentation is Hug My Land, a bronze sculpture approximately one metre tall. Its female figure folds inward, arms gathered around her body in a gesture that can be read as both an embrace and an act of self-protection. Rather than treating home simply as a location, the work considers what remains within us when we leave it.
“This work evokes an almost bodily relationship to the land,” Abdalla says. She describes an exchange between what a place passes on to us, what we project onto it and what we continue to carry after moving away. The sculpture’s intimate scale and inward posture give that idea a physical form: a body seeking shelter while becoming its own refuge.
An Emirati Voice in an International Conversation
Born in Sharjah in 1989, Abdalla works across painting, sculpture, film, photography, drawing and performance. Her practice draws on theatre, folklore and myth, using figures and imagined scenes to explore memory and the social structures that shape individual experience. In Hug My Land, those concerns converge around the female body, vulnerability and belonging.
The work also speaks to MENART FAIR’s 2026 theme, Where Is Home?, which invites artists to consider home as a place of sanctuary, identity and attachment. Founded by Laure d’Hauteville in 2021, the fair brings together modern and contemporary art from the MENA region and its diaspora.
For Boucheron, the new distinction extends a partnership that took shape around the fair’s focus on women’s perspectives in 2024. Poulit-Duquesne has framed the award as a way to celebrate women artists who work without compromise and challenge familiar ways of seeing. Abdalla’s recognition places an Emirati artist’s exploration of land, memory and the body at the centre of that conversation.
