In this Artnet News interview published on 23 June 2022, Dorian Batycka visits Maliha Tabari at her Dubai home to talk about a collection of more than 200 works.
The piece follows her path from a Palestinian childhood spent between Jordan and the Gulf, including years in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, through art studies in the United States and her return to Dubai. It recalls studio visits in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, and friendships with artists such as Adam Henein, Hussein Madi, Adel El Siwi and Khaled Zaki, whose work later entered museum collections.
She describes the house, a villa on the Palm, as a changing mix of modern and contemporary paintings, installations and sculpture, a bricolage across time, place and approach. Among the works discussed are HollyLand, a large mixed media piece by Hazem Harb that looks over the living space, a painting by the Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla, and a canvas by Hashel Al Lamki. The dining room brings together works by Paul Guiragossian, Hussein Madi, Sliman Mansour, Fateh Moudarres and Adel El Siwi.
She also talks about collecting from the artists she works with, and from fellow galleries, as a way of supporting the regional scene, and about never tiring of the modern works she has lived with since she began collecting at 21.
