FRIEZE ABU DHABI: Presenting Abdullah Al Saadi
Overview
BOOTH G2
2 PM to 9 PM
Aisha Alabbar Gallery brings new works from Abdullah Al Saadi’s ongoing series Naked Swee Potato to the inaugural Frieze Abu Dhabi, in a solo presentation in Global Futures, curated by Tarini Malik. First shown at the UAE National Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Naked Sweet Potato is one of the most significant bodies of work by a pioneering Emirati artist, brought to the fair by one of the first women-led Emirati galleries.
The series takes an everyday yet deeply personal object as its point of departure. Over the years, Al Saadi has returned to it in drawing, painting, sculpture, stone engraving and jewellery, alongside collected and archival material. The sweet potato is enlarged, fragmented and reimagined, moving between the recognisable and the abstract. What sets the work apart is this sustained attention to a single, seemingly ordinary object, and Al Saadi's ability to keep finding new possibilities within it. The works are also rooted in place. The sweet potato becomes a way into Al Saadi's reflections on childhood, family and the land around Khor Fakkan, where walking and collecting have long been
central to his practice. The project is less a study of a plant than an ongoing way of looking, one that turns something familiar into a source of memory, imagination and discovery. On the booth, Al Saadi continues Naked Sweet Potato in a single installation of new works made in 2025 and 2026: paintings in acrylic on stretched and rolled canvas, and Goddesses of the Naked Sweet Potato ( يراعلا لادنفلا تابر ), a group of ceramic sculptures of female figures in varying sizes. He develops each piece through repetition and variation, so the work grows gradually rather than arriving at a fixed conclusion. Fifteen years on from Venice, the series still reveals how much can be found in an object we might otherwise pass without notice.
