Khaleej Times ran this profile of Maliha Tabari in its business pages in November 2017, the year she took sole ownership of her Dubai gallery and renamed it Tabari Artspace. Written by Muhammad Riaz Usman, it carries the subheading that her gallery is a platform for regional artists to express themselves to the world, and treats her as a business founder first.
Tabari describes studying at Otis College of Art and Design in California and at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida, taking a BFA with a minor in art history before returning to Dubai to work with artists from the region. She opened the gallery in 2003, when the city was given over to construction and offered regional artists little in the way of a platform, and calls the decision a considered risk. She argues that the UAE has since become the region's principal art hub, drawing museums, fairs and auction houses closer, while noting that art has a long history locally and that the gallery did not invent its audience. The piece also covers two newer ventures: her regional representation of the publishers Taschen and Assouline, and Arternative, a storytelling and consultancy platform launched that month. Her advice to new collectors is to buy what they love from artists with a legible style; to entrepreneurs, to know their numbers and take criticism well.
The profile catches the gallery at a hinge point. The programme has since moved towards a younger Gulf and Levantine generation, but the account given here, of patient investment in artists and of an audience built rather than inherited, still describes how the gallery works.