Fellow Travellers Curated by Dr Omar Kholeif

Omar Kholeif has spent his career arguing that modernism was never a single movement happening in a single place. Fellow Travellers is the exhibition form of that argument. Curated from his research for imagine/otherwise — the publishing imprint he conceived with Sternberg Press — it presents five women artists whose practices were shaped by displacement, migration and political rupture, and whose work has rarely if ever been exhibited together, let alone in the Gulf. The five: Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023, Iraqi-British), Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Armenian-Iranian-American), Simone Fattal (b. 1942, Syrian-Lebanese-French), Lalitha Lajmi (1932–2023, Indian) and Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009, Portuguese). Their routes crossed Baghdad and Tehran, Damascus, Beirut and Kolkata, Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and New York. Kholeif describes their collective practice as "dreamwork" — a form of social imagination that treats displacement not as dislocation but as a method, a constitutive act of worlding. The works — painting, watercolour, etching, mixed media, ceramics — move from the unconscious into colour fields, textured surfaces and emotional landscapes. Helen Frankenthaler is named as a reference point; so is Simone Fattal's idea that "history is a continuous movement." Fellow Travellers is, in Kholeif's framing, a proposal: to reclaim movement as suture rather than rupture, to bring histories of late modernism into the present tense. This is the first exhibition in a series Kholeif is developing with Tabari Artspace. It is also the first opportunity for Gulf audiences to encounter this particular constellation of artists in the same room.