Artsy published Art Dubai Highlights the City's Growing Appeal with Asian Collectors, by Arun Kakar, on 4 March 2024. The fair report describes more than 100 exhibitors spread across the Madinat Jumeirah complex in four sections, Contemporary, Modern, Bawwaba and Digital, and follows how the fair and the city were drawing collectors from across Asia.
In the Digital section, Kakar singles out Tabari's solo booth of the young Emirati artist Talal Al Najjar as another strong presentation. His five scene CGI video Petro-Ghareebo: NAUSEA (2023) is described as an uncanny exercise in manipulation, translation and defamiliarisation of images: excavation sites become parking lots, and a video of a distorted dog watches over the booth, creating an eerie sense of the familiar and the alien. The article notes that the gallery also had a booth of women artists from the MENA region in the main section, and quotes Laura Beaney, then the gallery's director of communications: "We always want to be capturing the contemporary concerns of people." A work from that presentation, Chafa Ghaddar's Wildfire series #60 (2024), appears among the article's images.
Talal Al Najjar is an Emirati artist, curator and writer whose work spans sculpture, video, sound, CGI animation and installation, combining archival research with distortion and irony. Chafa Ghaddar is a Lebanese artist whose fresco based practice treats surfaces as bodies marked by time. Both artists are represented by Tabari.
