Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar's review in The Art Bystander, published on 12 October 2026, looks at Fellow Travellers at Tabari in Dubai. It opens with The Poets, Omar Kholeif's account of a mother who stopped writing poetry, and uses it to frame the show's concern with what happens to artistic knowledge when creative work is interrupted and who carries it forward.
The review takes the artists one by one. Sonia Balassanian's script-like abstractions are tied to Armenian poetry, with Hostages: A Diary (1980) and Cauterized Literature (1987), burnt books on canvas. Jai Chuhan's interiors include Self Portrait (1995) and her dancer paintings. Luísa Correia Pereira is shown through large paintings on paper made in Paris in the 1970s, released by her estate and never exhibited. Lalitha Lajmi worked at night and drew on dream journals, and her retrospective The Mind's Cupboard opened in Mumbai in January 2023. Irene Scheinmann's landscapes merge bodily and geological forms, with sources in Norwegian, Irish and Breton stone sites and work responding to Chernobyl.
The review describes the exhibition as the first major public platform for Irene Scheinmann in the Arabic-speaking world, and argues that organising modernism around artists, not movements, shows relationships of migration, mentorship and family. Kretzschmar credits the show to conversations between Kholeif and Maliha Tabari and to the imagine/otherwise series. The review treats Fellow Travellers as a project of research and long relationships with estates and artists.
