Selections gave its 67th edition, The Artistic Unity Issue, over to the art scene of the United Arab Emirates, with a sequence of interviews. This instalment is an extended conversation with Maliha Tabari, founder of the gallery that now trades as Tabari Artspace, following two decades of her work from the first premises to the current programme.
Tabari recalls opening at twenty-two in a small space at the Fairmont Hotel, where the gallery ran as Artspace between 2002 and 2006. The inaugural exhibition, Vis-a-vis, gathered three Persian artists, among them Shadi Ghadirian, around female identity and oppression. She took full ownership after her business partner left and renamed the gallery in 2017. The interview moves through earlier programming, including Mouneer El Shaarani in 2006, Mohammed Abla in 2007, a 2008 group showing of Adel El Siwi, Adam Henein, Omar El-Nagdi, Yousef Ahmad, Hussein Madi and Paul Guiragossian, Ahmed Mater in 2009, and Khaled Zaki's Treasuries of Knowledge at the Venice Biennale in 2013. It then turns to the artists she works with now: Maitha Abdalla on gendered and psychological subject matter, Hashel Al Lamki on landscape and sustainability, Chafa Ghaddar on fresco reworked for the present, and Hazem Harb on recontextualised historical photography. She sets out her collecting position, beginning with a Farhad Moshiri work she still holds, and rejects the label Middle Eastern art as too narrow.
She describes the Dubai gallery community as collaborative rather than competitive, and expects Gulf artists to be heard more widely over coming generations. Arriving in the gallery's twentieth year, the conversation reads as a stocktake.
