Selections Arts covered the opening of Tagreed Darghouth's solo exhibition Gardens and Jungles at Tabari Artspace in Dubai, running from 1 to 30 September 2023 at the gallery's DIFC space. The piece frames the show around Darghouth's response to the militarisation of everyday life, a concern the article links to the writing of geographer Stephen Graham, and describes her direct challenge to former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell's framing of Europe as a garden surrounded by a hostile jungle.
The article details a body of new paintings made in 2023 in acrylic across a deliberately varied range of surfaces, including canvas, printed fabric, camouflage paper and wood, with individual works ranging from 29 by 21 centimetres up to three metres square. It singles out Ares, a 180 by 140 centimetre acrylic on canvas depicting the Greek god of war, as representative of the show's recurring cast of military toys, helicopters and tanks set against camouflaged landscapes, flowers, trees and birds.
Gardens and Jungles marked one of Tagreed Darghouth's most materially varied solo presentations with Tabari Artspace, and this account of its central themes and key work, Ares, is a natural starting point for readers wanting to understand how her long engagement with war imagery took shape across an entire body of new paintings.
