Maiada Aboud

Maiada Aboud's work deals with ways in which social and religious structures interconnect and influence the individual. An endurance artist, Aboud uses her body to subvert Arab Israeli constructs of “woman”. For her, performance is a way of challenging patriarchal concepts and exploring notions of gender and sexuality embedded in the female body or the absent female sexual body that her culture has labelled as evil. She inscribes her own body in order to speak, using her art as a stage across which to express her frustration and anger, and as a platform for her rebellion against traditional conceptions of the image of “woman” in the Arab world.

Aboud attempts to connect social and cultural analysis to the individual’s experience, by way of performance and its relationship to culture and social life. Her intention is to investigate cultural identity by using endurance art and to establish if these performances are linked to collective identities. 

Selected exhibitions include:

2016: "Walking on Thin Ice", Ben Hagefen Art Gallery, Haifa
2016: After the Last Sky: A Festival in Berlin Transgressing Boundaries of Palestinian Life and Identity, Berlin
2014: Manam exhibition as part of the Qalandia Art Festival, Haifa
2014: We Art Festival, Jerusalem (solo exhibition)
2013: “Ward of Warning”, Emergency Festival, Manchester, UK
2012: “The Space Program Unit 4”, Coventry, UK (solo exhibition)
2012: “Bodies of Crisis”, Coventry, UK

Aboud completed her Masters at Coventry University and her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. Born in Palestine (Christian Arab Israeli), she graduated from Haifa University.