Abdullah Al Saadi is often cited as one of the  ‘Five’—a group of pioneering conceptual artists from the United Arab Emirates that includes Hassan Sharif, Hussain Sharif, Mohammed Kazem and Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim. All of the artists were at one point associated with the Emirates Fine Arts Society.

Al Saadi belongs to a generation that witnessed profound societal transformation due to the oil wealth, and his work slips in and out of the context of this historical shift, reframing traditional ways of life. Made from the upper part of flip flops, which have been embedded in small found rocks serving as the soles of the shoes, Stone Slippers (2013) suggests the extreme difficulty of traversing the harsh desert terrain on foot. The irony of the presentation lies in the fact that slippers are a type of footwear associated with comfort, freedom and ease of movement. Here, Al Saadi transforms the slippers into immobile objects,  affixed to the ground—permanent vesselsconnected to the environment.