Oliver Good's feature in The National, published on 4 December 2008, looks at art as an investment in Dubai just after the gallery, then called Artspace, had moved to DIFC.
Written in the weeks after the financial crash, the piece notes a cluster of new galleries in the district, including Artspace, which had relocated there. Maliha Tabari, named as the Palestinian born managing director of the gallery, is interviewed at length. She tells Good that buyers were typically people who could afford the work, many of them from banking, and that in a little over half a decade she had seen the Dubai market grow at speed.
"I've been in Dubai for six years and I came when there was almost no art," she says. Pictures that once struggled to sell at $3,000 were, by then, part of a very different market. She recalls trying hard to sell works by Farhad Moshiri for $2,000 or $3,000; five years later, she says, his work was fetching $200,000 or $300,000.
The feature is not a solo profile, but it is a substantial record of her voice at the moment of the DIFC opening, a few weeks after the Gate Village space was announced. The same opening is already covered, in Arabic, by the Al Bayan card on the News page.