The National published Maan Jalal's article Emirati Artist Almaha Jaralla Turns 1980s Abu Dhabi Family Life into Solo Show in summer 2023, a review of Seham, Jaralla's solo exhibition at Tabari in DIFC. Jalal writes that the show will feel familiar to anyone who grew up in the Gulf in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Three sets of majlis style sofas, upholstered in a pink floral fabric echoed on the wallpaper, surround glass coffee tables with family photographs pressed beneath their surfaces. Around them hang frameless oil paintings, based on images taken in the 1980s by Jaralla's great aunt Seham with a Fuji camera. Born in 1996, the artist describes the work as a conversation with her younger father, and explains that she wanted visitors to feel inside a pink filter. One painting focuses on Al Maqtaa Bridge, built in 1968 as the first structure to connect the island to the mainland, a subject linking the past and present, tradition and modernity, record keeping and nostalgia. Jalal describes her painting of lush, free flowing backgrounds against still figures, and Jaralla frames the work as a way "to talk about the modern history of the region," using her family archives as a tool to open that conversation.
Almaha Jaralla is an Emirati painter working predominantly in pigment on textile, restaging gestures of everyday Gulf life with ancestral ties to Aden. She is represented by Tabari.
