Following her art school education in the US, where the post-9/11 climate conditioned her understanding of how the Arab world was being represented to international audiences, Maliha Tabari returned to the Gulf motivated to present the region’s artists on their own terms. At 21, she founded Artspace (later Tabari Artspace) in Dubai, one of the first contemporary art galleries in the Gulf.

During the early days, Maliha travelled across the MENA region, visiting the modern masters. These studio visits became the foundation of the gallery’s programme and the beginning of friendships that endure today.

The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Vis-à-Vis, brought together the photography of Shadi Ghadirian and works by Bahram Jajali. Vis-à-Vis contributed to the early focus on Persian artists working in the aftermath of 9/11. Later, the gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Farhad Moshiri in the Gulf (2004), introducing his practice to the region at an early stage in his career.

Mohamed Abla's work is presented at the British Museum, London, the first of several major institutional showings for artists the gallery has developed. Abla's institutional record extends across the Havana, Alexandria, Sharjah, Kuwait and Cairo biennials, with prizes including the Grand Prix at Alexandria in 1997 and First Prize at Kuwait in 1994, alongside museum presentations at the British Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art in Bonn, Colby College Museum of Art and the Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut. In addition to his work as an artist, Abla founded the Fayoum Art Center in 2006, part of a long commitment to supporting emerging Egyptian artists through residencies, workshops and grants.

Tabari Artspace enjoyed a long and meaningful connection with Hussein Madi throughout his career. This was the first of many solo presentations of Madi, one of the foundational figures of Lebanese modernism, whose work synthesises Arabic calligraphic structure with the rhythmic geometric language of twentieth-century abstraction. The exhibition reflects the gallery's early commitment to celebrating the pioneers of Arab modernism and presenting their work within the institutional discourse of the Gulf, several years before such practices entered the focus of major international museum collections.

Tabari Artspace presents a solo exhibition by Hassan Sharif, a foundational figure in conceptual art in the United Arab Emirates and one of the "Five" pioneers of contemporary Emirati practice alongside Mohammed Kazem, Abdullah Al Saadi, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim and Hussein Sharif. Sharif's practice, developed across more than four decades through performance, drawing, painting and the assemblage of everyday materials, introduced conceptualism and Fluxus to the Gulf and inspired a generation of artists through his work as educator, writer and translator of international art texts into Arabic. The exhibition reflects the gallery's early commitment to Emirati practice, presenting Sharif to Gulf audiences two years before he was selected as the inaugural artist to represent the UAE at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. His work is held in the collections of Mathaf, the Centre Pompidou, Tate, the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Tabari Artspace presents Faces, a solo exhibition of Adel El Siwi’s acclaimed, monumental, elongated portraits, a body of work that interrogates the human figure as both anatomical study and philosophical enquiry. The faces refuse psychological realism in favour of presence, each figure standing as an enigmatic threshold between portraiture, mythology and inner life. The exhibition introduces this body of work to Gulf audiences two years before El Siwi represents Egypt at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Works by the artist later enter the collections of the British Museum, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Institut du Monde Arabe and Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art.

Tabari Artspace relocates to the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), establishing the gallery within the UAE’s primary hub for international collectors, auction houses and a growing early community of galleries.  The new space opens with a solo exhibition of Adam Henein, one of the most significant Egyptian modernists of the twentieth century, whose monumental bronze and granite figures draw on Pharaonic sculpture and the formal traditions of the ancient Nile.  The move positions Tabari Artspace at the centre of a rapidly expanding regional art infrastructure, at a moment when Dubai is becoming the principal point of entry for international engagement with MENA art.

Tabari Artspace presents a solo exhibition by Omar El-Nagdi, one of the most significant Egyptian modernists of the twentieth century, known in his lifetime as the "Egyptian Picasso." Trained in Cairo, Moscow, Venice and Ravenna, El-Nagdi worked across painting, sculpture, mosaic, ceramic and graphic art, moving from figurative compositions of Egyptian folk life in the 1950s to the calligraphic abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s that became central to his practice. His repetition of Arabic letterforms, particularly the Alef, placed his work within the Hurufiyyah movement that developed across the Arab world, Turkey and South Asia in the mid-twentieth century, the rhythm of the script drawing on the Sufi practice of zikr as a meditative invocation. The exhibition expresses the gallery's curatorial commitment to the recovery of Arab modernism within the Gulf. His work is held in the collections of Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, and is represented across major museum and auction histories, with his 1992 painting Sarajevo setting an auction record for the artist in 2016.

Tabari Artspace presents a group exhibition of Arab modernist pioneers, Adel El Siwi, Adam Henein, Fateh Moudarres, Omar El-Nagdi, Yousef Ahmad, Louay Kayali, Hussein Madi, Mohamed Abla and Paul Guiragossian. The exhibition stages a curatorial argument central to the gallery's identity, that Arab modernism, long underrepresented within international art history, requires scholarly and exhibitionary attention from within the Gulf. The presentation places the work of the gallery's roster in dialogue with the long arc of twentieth-century practice across Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and the wider region.

Kamal Boullata, Homage to al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, a landmark solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace for one of the most important geometric abstract painters of his generation. Boullata's practice synthesised the geometric grammar of Islamic calligraphy with the language of Western modernist abstraction, the Kufic letterform refracted through the square as a means of summoning Jerusalem, the city he was displaced from in 1967 and never permitted to return to. He was also the foremost scholar of Palestinian art history, his book Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (Saqi, 2009) representing three decades of original research and remaining the most comprehensive survey on the subject. His works are held in the collections of the British Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, the Museum of the Alhambra in Granada, the Sharjah Art Museum, the Barjeel Art Foundation and Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art. Tabari Artspace is among the first Gulf galleries to give Boullata a platform, situating his practice within a broader curatorial argument for the recovery of Palestinian modernism.

The gallery presents an early exhibition of Ahmed Mater, several years before Edge of Arabia brought Saudi contemporary art to European and American audiences, reflecting Maliha’s longstanding relationships with artists from the Kingdom where she grew up, and her early recognition of a practice engaging the transformation of Saudi society, faith and urban life. His work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian, with major solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian, the Sharjah Art Foundation and UCCA Edge in Shanghai, and biennial participations at Venice in 2009 and 2011. He was the founding director of the Misk Art Institute in Riyadh from 2017 to 2018, and received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2024.

Adel El Siwi participates in the 53rd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in the Egyptian Pavilion. Siwi's institutional record extends across two Venice Biennales in 1997 and 2009, the Sharjah Biennial in 1997, the Cairo Biennale in 1996 and 2008, the 23rd São Paulo Biennale and the Alexandria International Art Biennale, with major museum presentations at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, the Modern Art Museum in Cape Town, the National Gallery in Johannesburg, the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the Orlando Museum of Modern Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Mathaf in Doha, the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, the Kinda Foundation in Riyadh and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunis. The participation confirms the international standing of an Egyptian figurative tradition that Tabari Artspace pioneered within the Gulf.

The gallery presents work by Yousef Ahmed, a pioneer of Qatar's modern art movement and the first Qatari artist to stage a solo exhibition dedicated to the Hurufiyyah movement in Doha in 1977. Trained at Helwan University in Cairo and Mills College in California, Ahmed creates textured abstractions overlaid with Arabic calligraphy, drawing on the desert landscape of Qatar, the worn textiles of the region and pigments and materials he develops himself. Beyond his own practice, Ahmed played a central role in building the collection that became Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art. His work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mathaf and the Barjeel Art Foundation. The exhibition reflects the gallery's enduring attention to artists from within the Gulf.

The gallery presents a solo exhibition of Lulwah Al Homoud, one of the pioneering figures of contemporary Saudi art and the first Saudi to graduate with an MA from Central Saint Martins. Al Homoud's distinctive practice, in which Arabic calligraphy is broken down into mathematically grounded geometric patterns, draws on the long traditions of Islamic art and the abstract languages of Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian. The exhibition consolidates the gallery's early commitment to Saudi women artists. Works by Al Homoud enter the collections of the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Jeju National Museum, the Five Continents Museum in Munich, the Green Box Museum and the Barjeel Art Foundation.

The Arab Spring transforms the political landscape of the MENA region, and artists across the gallery's programme respond from within their own specific contexts. The gallery's focus turns to Egyptian perspectives in particular, presenting a generation of artists working through the upheaval. Khaled Zaki produces monumental bronze figures that process collective trauma and renewal. Mohamed Abla records the textures of Egyptian life through a period of rupture. Khaled Hafez, who documented the January 25 uprising firsthand from Tahrir Square, brings his hybrid visual language to bear on the moment, layering Pharaonic iconography with the images of contemporary media to register the long arc of Egyptian political consciousness from antiquity into the present. The gallery exhibits Hafez during this period, presenting one of the most internationally recognised Egyptian artists of his generation.

The gallery launches a second space in London with My Family, My People, a solo exhibition by Mohamed Abla. The body of work emerges from the immediate aftermath of the Egyptian uprisings, Abla’s portraits and figure compositions registering the texture of a society in transformation. The London space extends Tabari Artspace’s programme into one of the central markets for Middle Eastern art, situating its artists within the city’s network of museums, auction houses and international collectors.

Following his biennale presentation, Khaled Zaki presents In the Wind of January at Tabari Artspace, the first solo exhibition to address the aftermath of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 directly through sculpture. The work marks an early stage in what becomes the Resurrection series, Zaki's ongoing reckoning with collective trauma, civic rupture and the possibility of renewal. Trained at Cairo University and in the marble workshops of Pietrasanta, Italy, Zaki became the first foreign winner of the Pietrasanta Painting Prize in 1989, won the International Artist Prize at Art Taipei in 2015, and showed The Lost Treasure at the 7th Beijing International Biennale in 2017. His work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the Egyptian Museum for Modern Art in Cairo and the Egyptian Museum for Modern Sculpture in Aswan.

Hazem Harb participates in the FotoFest Houston Biennial in 2014 with A View from Inside, among the earliest international biennial presentations of his archival and collage practice on Palestinian dispossession and memory. The years that follow consolidate his international standing, with inclusions in Common Grounds at Villa Stuck Museum, Munich, and The Written City in Bruges in 2015, Chers Amis at the Centre Pompidou and a presentation at The Armory Show in New York in 2016. In 2017, Harb participates in The Absence of Paths at the Tunisian Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, Tunisia's first national pavilion in over 50 years, curated by Lina Lazaar. The following year Harb is included in Active Forms at the Sharjah Art Foundation. His work enters the collections of the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Institut du Monde Arabe and the Oriental Museum at Durham University.

Tabari Artspace presents El Beit, a group exhibition bringing together Hazem Harb, Sliman Mansour and Mohammed Joha. The Arabic word el beit translates as the house or the home, a term that carries particular weight in the Palestinian context, where home is at once an inherited memory, a contested site and a place from which one is displaced. The exhibition places three generations of Palestinian artists in conversation to address the ongoing erasure of collective memory, with home the site through which each artist reconstructs what has been undone. By staging modernist and contemporary practices side by side, El Beit positions the gallery as a pioneering platform for intergenerational Palestinian art history.

Tabari Artspace presents a solo exhibition by Naqsh Collective, the sister duo Nisreen and Nermeen Abudail, Jordanian artists of Palestinian descent. The Arabic word naqsh translates as to engrave or to inscribe, the oldest of human gestures for leaving a mark, telling a story and asserting presence. The exhibition extends the collective's distinctive practice, in which the language of Palestinian tatreez embroidery, traditionally stitched by women into garments, shawls and bridal trousseaus, is translated into sculptural form across marble, brass, stone and wood. The embroidered motif, once carried in fabric that fades with time, is rendered in materials that resist decay, the work asserting Palestinian heritage as durable, present and unyielding. Their work has since been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as finalists for the Jameel Prize 5, and across major design and art institutions internationally. The exhibition reflects the gallery's commitment to Palestinian practice and to artists working across disciplines.

Hazem Harb participates in the 13th Cairo Biennale. Khaled Zaki, Mohamed Abla, Lulwah Al Homoud, and Hazem Harb are included in Reflections, Contemporary Art of the Middle East at the British Museum, London. The presentation marks the entry of artists central to the gallery's programme into one of the most significant museum surveys of contemporary Middle Eastern practice.

Tabari Artspace presents Strange Fruit, a solo exhibition by Tagreed Darghouth, the Lebanese painter whose research-driven practice addresses the structural violence of contemporary life in acrylic on canvas. The title borrows from Billie Holiday's anti-lynching song, redirecting its weight to the Palestinian olive tree, the central motif of the exhibition and the marker of a land repeatedly uprooted. The olive, rendered in full glory or as severed stump, stands in for the Palestinian people and the violence inflicted on their territory. Strange Fruit marks the first appearance of the tree in Darghouth's work, a motif that recurs in subsequent bodies including The Tree Within, A Palestinian Olive Tree. Darghouth trained at the Lebanese University and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and studied under the Syrian modernist Marwan Kassab Bashi at the Ayloul Summer Academy in Amman. The same year as Strange Fruit, Darghouth shows at the Gropius Bau in Berlin in Walking Through Walls, alongside Mona Hatoum and Marina Abramović, and in Ourouba/Arabicity at the Middle East Institute Gallery in Washington DC, curated by Rose Issa. She is the recipient of the Boghossian Prize for young Lebanese painters in 2012, and her work is held in the Barjeel Art Foundation and the Dalloul Art Foundation.

Tabari Artspace rebrands, adopting a bridge as its symbol, a declaration of the gallery’s mission: a platform connecting generations, geographies and communities through art. 

Maliha formalises a programme of grants, residencies and mentorship for emerging Gulf artists, an investment driven by the gallery's interest in the questions a new generation of practices was working through in the years following the rapid transformation of the region. Over four years, 2021 to 2024, six artists would define this moment and become central to the gallery's identity: Hashel Al Lamki, Maitha Abdalla, Almaha Jaralla, Talal Al Najjar, Ziad Al Najjar and Alymamah Rashed.

Hazem Harb is included in Global(e) Resistance at the Centre Georges Pompidou, his second major presentation at the institution. 

Tabari Artspace's roster expands to embed practices from across the Arab diaspora, among them Saj Issa, Rema Ghuloum,  Aya Haidar, and Pippa El-Kadhi Brown. Each artist operates from a distinct vantage, the programme drawing diasporic voices into conversation with the cultural inheritance of the region while opening that inheritance onto other geographies and contexts.  In this way, interconnected stories come forward with practices extending the region's conversation outward and folding new conversations back into it.

Chafa Ghaddar and Hashel Al Lamki are presented at the Lyon Biennale, their inclusion reflecting the international biennial circuit's growing engagement with practices developed within the gallery's programme on questions of ecology, ephemerality and material memory.

Aya Haidar’s Highly Strung (2020), a year-long durational embroidery work produced during lockdown, is acquired by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. 

The gallery marks its twentieth anniversary and launches its artist residency at the La Serena hotel in Forte dei Marmi, Italy, offering artists dedicated time for research and production.

The gallery marks its twentieth anniversary across a year defined by major institutional milestones for its artists. Maitha Abdalla presents Will The Gods Belong?, a site-specific multidisciplinary installation, at Sharjah Biennial 15, occupying the courtyard and lateral rooms of Bait Hussein Makrani, before participating in Evaporating Suns, Contemporary Myths from the Arabian Gulf at Kulturstiftung Basel H.E.K. Mohamed Monaiseer is presented at TEFAF Maastricht. MAQAM, a survey of Hashel Al Lamki curated by Dr Venetia Porter of the British Museum, is presented at Abu Dhabi Art. Samah Shihadi participates in LACMA's group exhibition, Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond. Tagreed Darghouth presents Gardens and Jungles at the gallery, a body of work responding to the militarisation of civil society.

Tabari Artspace presents Postmordial Soup at ICD Brookfield Place, a group exhibition by Emirati artists Talal Al Najjar and Ziad Al Najjar alongside Iraqi artist Miramar Al Nayyar. The exhibition is the outcome of a four-week artist residency held on site at ICD Brookfield Place under its Art Program, in collaboration with the gallery, with the three artists forming a studio together in the space and developing new work in continuous dialogue. The exhibition's title responds to questions on the origins of life and the conditions that have come to define the contemporary moment, with the artists drawing on video, sound, sculpture and CGI to construct an immersive environment that reads at once as a sanctuary of origin and an extraterrestrial terrain. The collaboration extends the gallery's commitment to emerging regional voices and to the technologies through which a new generation reads the world, and falls within the gallery's twentieth anniversary programme, the moment at which Tabari Artspace pays direct attention to the wave of emerging talent the region is producing.

Tabari Artspace presents Battlegrounds, a solo exhibition by Aya Haidar. The exhibition takes gendered labour as its central argument, that the domestic sphere, the refugee camp, the street and the zone of armed conflict are all sites in which women's bodies and work are simultaneously essential and invisible. Through such solo exhibitions and with equal representation of male and female artists, the gallery has consistently championed the female gaze across its programme.

The gallery's roster enters a sequence of major biennial and triennial recognitions across the year. Hashel Al Lamki participates in the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial under the theme Public Matter, contributing site-specific work across Abu Dhabi and Al Ain alongside more than seventy local and international artists, before presenting at Sharjah Biennial 16, to carry. Maitha Abdalla makes her debut at the Aichi Triennale in Japan, one of Asia's most significant contemporary art platforms. Talal Al Najjar is included in Archaeology of New Media Arts in the Arab World at the Diriyah Art Futures Museum, the survey charting more than four decades of new-media practice across the region. Mohamed Monaiseer participates in Art Basel Miami Beach and Art X Lagos. Hashel Al Lamki, Miramar Al Nayyar and Lulwah Al Homoud are presented at the inaugural Art Week Riyadh under the theme At The Edge. The gallery also stages Hot Spots at Sotheby's Dubai, its first collaborative exhibition with The Third Line, and The Power of Intention in Milan's Brera district at Villa Cramer, presenting work from its La Serena artists' residency.

Tabari Artspace presents Mesh & Mayhem, a solo exhibition by Talal Al Najjar, curated by Salem AlSuwaidi. The exhibition is the gallery's first dedicated to the digital sphere, marking a new direction in the programme as Tabari Artspace extends its engagement with the technologies and visual languages that increasingly mediate contemporary life. Al Najjar, an Emirati artist based between Los Angeles and Dubai, works across CGI animation, video, sculpture, sound and painting, his practice examining the slippages between digital architectures and the material cultures of the Gulf. Mesh & Mayhem reads simulation as structure and rupture, the digital fabric stretched thin across speculative futures and fragmented histories. Recurring figures of folklore, goblin-like runners and translated artefacts circulate through the work, ancient archetypes redrawn through the visual grammar of the internet age. The exhibition reflects on the world the artist navigates as an Emirati of his generation, one in which heritage is code, the screen - terrain, and the boundaries between past, present and counter-future dissolve. Al Najjar holds an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has shown across the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Tabari Artspace presents Hujra (حُجرة), a solo exhibition by the Iraqi artist Miramar Al Nayyar, curated by Abeer Seikaly, at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai's leading contemporary arts district. The Arabic word hujra translates as chamber and shares its root with hajar, the word for stone, the title naming the relation between the body's interior and the mineral surface, the chamber as a site through which inner experience emerges into material form. The exhibition opens during Alserkal Art Week 2025, bringing the gallery's roster to a new audience and engaging the experimental, multidisciplinary community that has shaped the district's character over the past decade.

Tabari Artspace participates in the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, presenting a solo booth dedicated to Hazem Harb. The fair's launch in Doha marks the first expansion of Art Basel into the Gulf, a recognition of the region's emergence as a central site of contemporary art production and exchange.

During this period, the gallery's curatorial vision is carried across exhibitions working at the intersections of the present and the longer art historical record, alongside a new media platform. Same Air, a group exhibition of fourteen artists rooted in the Gulf, responds directly to a shared moment of disruption, capturing the zeitgeist of artists working through an unprecedented present. Fellow Travellers, curated by Dr Omar Kholeif, brings together seminal female modernists whose practices have been marginalised within the prevailing art historical narrative. Tabari Artspace also launches Out of Frame, a media platform dedicated to new narratives and voices from the art world, bringing artists and thinkers into conversation beyond the boundaries of the gallery's roster.