OpenSpace covered Fellow Travellers, the exhibition at Tabari Artspace DIFC curated by cultural historian Dr Omar Kholeif and running to 5 June 2026, which brings together five artists whose lives were shaped by movement, displacement and layered identity: Irene Scheinmann, Sonia Balassanian, Simone Fattal, Lalitha Lajmi and Luisa Correia Pereira. The piece describes the show as the first in a series Kholeif is developing with Tabari around the diasporic imagination, treating displacement as a generative method rather than simple loss.
Several works in the show have rarely or never been publicly exhibited before, and OpenSpace names specific pieces: Simone Fattal's stoneware sculptures Tree (2012) and The Siege (2019), Sonia Balassanian's untitled acrylic on canvas, Irene Scheinmann's etching Storm at Sunset, and a 1988 mixed-media collage on canvas by Luisa Correia Pereira. The article frames the exhibition as part of a wider reassessment of women's roles in twentieth-century art history, foregrounding practices it describes as intellectually rigorous despite long marginalisation.
Tabari represents Irene Scheinmann, the sole Tabari roster artist among the five; Scheinmann, born in Baghdad in 1933, shows Storm at Sunset in Fellow Travellers alongside painters and sculptors whose careers span Beirut, Paris, Tehran, Mumbai and Lisbon. The exhibition's cross-generational grouping situates her etching practice within a broader conversation about diaspora that Kholeif intends to continue in future instalments.
