For the last two decades, Tabari Artspace gallery has played a vital role in connecting international audiences and institutions to the modern and contemporary art of the MENA region.

Grounded in the notion that art has the capacity to dismantle borders, foster new ways of knowing and stimulate cross-cultural understanding, Tabari Artspace gallery forms a bridge between worlds, a platform pioneering a diverse roster of exhibitions at the intersection of the local and the global.

Programming
Over twenty years Tabari Artspace has chartered the evolution of MENA art. Our represented artists from the MENA region and its diaspora are conceptually engaged with issues pertinent to the human condition and united through fine art quality. Advanced by an all-women team, Tabari Artspace foregrounds female figures and marginalised perspectives in contemporary art.

Our approach to presentation transcends the rigidity of the white cube space. In dialogue with our artists, we diffuse their artistic explorations into immersive and unexpected environments that establish new modes of engagement with art. The cultural ecosystem in the UAE has been central to the Tabari Artspace trajectory; as such the gallery strives to contribute to the region’s cultural vision. Through the representation of artists originating from and taking root in the GCC, as well as international practitioners that cast their gaze towards it Tabari Artspace forms a platform for discovery.

Community
Community engagement and wider social access to MENA art are at the core of Tabari Artspace’s missions. Physical programming is supplemented by digital counterparts, talks, publishing, workshops, and community events. The Tabari Artspace international residency programme encourages the artists of the region to expand their practice amid new contexts.

For Art Dubai 2023 Tabari Artspace will present three emerging artists from the Gulf – Nasser Almulhim, Ziad Al Najjar and Hashel Al Lamki united by a mutual interest in explorations for form and fluidity as well as inner and external realms.

Emirati painter and multi-disciplinary artist, Hashel Al Lamki’s art unpacks the relationship between humankind and their habitat, the wild and constructed. Al Lamki refuses the separation of man and nature, his practice underscores the dependency of mankind on natural resources and their subsequent responsibility for the environmental catastrophe that looms. His approach to art fuses social innovation, sustainability, and environmental consciousness. Inspired by scientific methodologies and local artisanal processes. For Art Dubai Emirati visual artist, Hashel Al Lamki has produced a series of paintings using natural pigment on canvas that capture an imagined journey from day to night across Al Ain’s mountain range. Al Lamki’s gestural strokes and luminescent palette embody an almost psychedelic quality.

Al Lamki mines memory and imagination to produce paintings in contrasting fluorescent and muted palettes that reveal an oneiric universe. This series began in 2020 at the peak of the Pandemic when mobility was limited. Confirmed to his studio Al Lamki embarked upon journeys of the mind, chartering shifts in light from sunrise to nightfall. In Al Lamki’s words: “Through absence I could better understand myself and the environment.”

Emirati visual artist Ziad Al Najjar has produced a series of two-dimensional works on canvas for Art Dubai that continue the artist’s explorations of the interplay between organic and inorganic forms. Al Najjar infuses his symbolically dense work with icons and influence from the natural world. The artist considers the connectedness between the natural, constructed and spiritual realms and how they relate to his lived experience in the contemporary moment. The Islamic miniatures made familiar to him during his childhood regularly appear as motifs within his practice. Al Najjar summons this world into his art infusing it with his recent experiences of flora, fauna, or soft shapes that resemble cells under a microfine glass. Delicate and sensual organic forms – some representational some abstract – ungulate across the artist’s canvas. Translation and tension – between past and present, structure and wildness – are central to this work.

Saudi painter and 3D artist Nasser Almulhim’s practice meditates upon the interaction between geometric and organic forms and their connection to the human psyche. His practice assumes a playful and intuitive approach to art-making, doubling as a therapeutic act that opens what the artist understands to be: “the gate of self-healing.” For Art Dubai, Nasser Almulhim has produced a new sculptural work that materialises the artist’s inner child.  The artist is fascinated with the emboldened palette that characterises the playgrounds that are popular in Riyadh. Following the writings of psychoanalysts Jung and Freud, he contends that by establishing a conversation with his inner child repressed memories or trauma might be unleashed. Almulhim draws influence from multiple movements in art history from Modernism to Abstract Expressionism; in this work the influence of Calder’s joyful and animated mobile sculptures is palpable.