Maan Jalal's report for The National, published on 29 February 2024, on the booth Tabari Artspace took to Art Dubai that year. The presentation, titled Corporeal: Lands Through The Female Gaze, gathered seven women artists from the region and its diaspora in the fair's contemporary hall at Madinat Jumeirah, and set body and land against one another as a single subject.
Jalal moves through paint, tapestry, textile and installation. Tagreed Darghouth's The Tree Within; A Palestinian Olive Tree occupies three large canvases of vast olive trees, branches thrown outward and roots tangled, handled in loose brushwork against strong skies. Aya Haidar's Al Umm embroiders Arabic text onto an inherited chair and footstool, the chair reading as mother and the footstool carrying the saying that heaven lies beneath mothers' feet; her red cursive neon, hung above Darghouth's canvases, works both as a line of flirtation and as a remark on Lebanon's daily power cuts. Miramar Al Nayyar's Whispers of the Void and Alymamah Rashed's Green Stems Hold The Fields of You and I are also in the booth, with Maitha Abdalla and Chafa Ghaddar completing the group. Maliha Tabari tells Jalal that geographic and regional labels are restrictive and that the artists' merits sit outside market categories.
Corporeal marked the point at which the gallery's long-standing interest in women artists from the Arab world became the stated frame for a fair presentation rather than a thread running through the programme.
