Be The Stone: Tabari, Frieze Abu Dhabi 2026
"And if you were not the tree, my love, then be the stone."
— Mahmoud Darwish
Tabari Artspace presents Be the Stone, a multi-artist booth bringing together Egyptian artist Khaled Zaki (b. 1964, Suez, Egypt), Iraqi-British artist Irene Scheinmann (b. 1933, Baghdad, Iraq), and Palestinian artists Kamal Boullata (1942–2019, born Jerusalem, Palestine) and Hazem Harb (b. 1980, Gaza, Palestine).
The title takes its cue from a line by Mahmoud Darwish: "And if you were not the tree, my love, then be the stone." The line opens a proposition. To be the stone is a matter of choice: a way of holding ground, of remaining present, of taking form under changing conditions. It captures within it the possibility of becoming otherwise.
Stone enters into the formation of the structures we live among, from monuments to ruins, and it surfaces at the moments when societies are dismantled and rebuilt. Stone also sits close to the body—held in the hand, carried, released—gestures long embedded in histories of force and control. Across the works gathered here, stone becomes the material through which questions of endurance, reconstruction and attachment to place are thought through.
In Khaled Zaki's marble sculpture from the Resurrection series, developed in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution, stone is approached as a productive force in a moment of uncertainty. Zaki carves into marble, a material associated with permanence, and draws from it fragmented bodily forms that register collapse while reaching towards reconstruction. The surface carries the marks of time as accumulated experience, where fissures and erosion register duration rather than decline. Zaki works through a process of revelation, allowing the figure to be released from within the mass, as though its form precedes the act of carving. The selected work keeps the body in suspension, suggesting a moment of rising. For Zaki, stone holds collapse and renewal together, and with them the possibility of rebuilding.
In the work of Irene Scheinmann, stone is a means through which interior states are approached. Scheinmann's vibrational etchings draw on a sustained engagement with the rock formations of Hvasser, an island in southern Norway, translating density and fracture through a rigorous printmaking process. Working across intaglio techniques, she builds up her surfaces in successive stages, incising and reworking the plate to produce images of compressed force. Stone is encountered here as something that absorbs duration and resistance, a way of thinking through the human condition. Geological time is brought into proximity with lived experience, and external terrain is reworked as an internal one.
For Palestinian artists, stone carries layered and contested meanings. It forms the material basis of streets, houses and cities, grounding a sense of continuity and place.
Kamal Boullata approaches stone through geometry and architectural form. The dome recurs as a central motif, sustaining a relation to Jerusalem while working through the conditions of displacement. Through precise geometric construction, Boullata holds open a connection to place that persists across distance.
Hazem Harb approaches stone through the alignment of the body and the monument. Born in Gaza and now working between Palestine and the UAE, Harb maintains a powerful engagement with rupture, displacement, and the violence enacted upon land and people. His expressive works move between figuration and abstraction, where forms can be read simultaneously as wounded bodies, archaeological fragments and collapsing structures. Drawing on the visual language of excavation, ruin and historical residue, Harb treats the surface as a site where personal and collective histories are carried together. The works hold an intense physicality, registering pressure, grief and endurance, while insisting on the continued presence of Palestinian life and memory.
These practices reveal how stone embodies weight, duration and attachment. It anchors bodies to land, forms the structures people inhabit, and enters into the long process of destruction and rebuilding.
