AD Middle East's coverage of Tagreed Darghouth centred on Gardens and Jungles, her solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace in Dubai's DIFC, which opened in September 2023. The piece placed the show against the militarisation of everyday civilian life, taking up Stephen Graham's writing on how warfare reshapes cities and pushing back against Josep Borrell's description of Europe as a tended "garden" surrounded by a hostile "jungle", a framing Darghouth treated as an outdated way of dividing the world.
The exhibition paired natural imagery, landscapes, flowers, trees and birds, with the iconography of conflict: Ares, helicopters, tanks and toy soldiers. Works such as Ares (2023), an acrylic on canvas, and The Tank Series 1 (2023), acrylic on wood, sat alongside pieces from the Gardens and Jungles series painted over camouflage-printed fabric and paper, ranging from small studies of 29 by 21 centimetres up to canvases three metres square. Darghouth built her surfaces through expressive, gestural impasto layered directly onto the printed camouflage, letting the natural motifs push back against the military patterns beneath them.
Born in Beirut in 1979, Darghouth has built a practice around the visual language of conflict and its civilian aftermath, work previously examined at length by The National under the title Life and Death and Olive Trees. Gardens and Jungles, running at Tabari Artspace until 18 November 2023, extended that inquiry into a Gulf gallery context, reading the resilience of the natural world as a counterweight to militarised space.
