The National published this piece by Maan Jalal on 3 July 2023, timed to the opening of Almaha Jaralla's solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace in Dubai's DIFC. The article surveys how the Emirati artist built a show around her family's history, framing it as a portrait of Abu Dhabi domestic life in the 1980s.
The paintings on view, among them Between Two Bridges, Old Corniche 2 Seham, Al Shelaylah, Beker and Reem, are mid to large-scale, frameless oils worked from photographs her great aunt Seham took on a Fuji camera. The gallery itself was reconfigured to evoke a period Gulf majlis, with sofas upholstered in pink floral fabric and glass coffee tables carrying the source photographs alongside the canvases. Al Maqtaa Bridge, built in 1968 to link Abu Dhabi island to the mainland, recurs across the paintings as a marker of the city's growth. As Jaralla told the paper, "I'm using my family to talk about periods of time in Abu Dhabi that a lot of people can relate to."
The exhibition, titled Seham, extended the archival, family-photograph-based method Almaha Jaralla had already begun exploring, and it remains a reference point for her practice of turning private snapshots into shared civic memory. It runs on Tabari Artspace's own listing for Seham, where the full body of work can be seen.
