Artnet News, through its Gallery Network, published a founder Q and A with Maliha Tabari on 12 April 2021, looking back at 18 years of running the gallery she opened in Dubai in 2003.
The interview asks how the landscape for Middle Eastern art has changed since that opening. Maliha recalls an early programme built on friendships with modern artists whose studios she visited across the region, among them Adam Henein, Omar El Nagdi, Hussein Madi and Mohamed Abla. She traces the gallery name to Lake Tiberias, a place she describes as rich in history, and to ideas of borders, space, place and identity that run through the artists' work.
Asked for a memory from those years, she returns to Beirut and to time spent with Hussein Madi, first as a collector and later as his gallerist, including evening talks on his terrace. She also names two Gulf artists then coming into the programme, Alymamah Rashed and Maitha Abdalla, and points to the need to keep adapting how the gallery exhibits and communicates.
The conversation was published as the gallery prepared Samah Shihadi and Michael Halak's Terra (Un)firma, Alymamah Rashed's first solo exhibition, and a presentation of Maitha Abdalla at Cromwell Place in London.
