VOLTA Art Fairs published this Meet the Gallery Q and A with Maliha Tabari on 26 May 2022, ahead of the gallery's presentation at VOLTA Basel that June.
She describes a childhood spent between the Levant and the Gulf, art studies in the United States in the 1990s, and the building of a personal collection before the Dubai gallery opened. Early on, she says, she flew to the Levant and North Africa to meet artists who are now widely regarded as modern masters, and she later saw their work enter collections including the Centre Pompidou and the British Museum. As a new generation appeared, the programme widened to artists dealing with migration, globalisation and digital life. She also talks about a women led team and about working with Tagreed Darghouth, Maitha Abdalla and Samah Shihadi.
For VOLTA, the gallery presented two hyperrealists, Samah Shihadi and Michael Halak, and their views on lived experience in Haifa. Shihadi's charcoal drawings sit between figurative realism and a more dreamlike register. Halak's selected paintings, including works from the Terra Sancta series, look at the identity of Christian Palestinians and at the meeting of faith, politics and material life.
Asked for advice to new collectors, she says: "Collect what feels authentic and what you are drawn to."
