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Curatorial Ethos
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Tabari Artspace is a commercial gallery in Gate Village, DIFC, founded in 2003 by Maliha Tabari as Artspace Dubai — one of the first galleries in the UAE dedicated to contemporary Middle Eastern art. Rebranded as Tabari Artspace in 2018, the gallery represents over twenty emerging and established artists from across the MENA region, with a particular emphasis on female artists and diasporic practices engaging with memory, identity and displacement. Artists include Hazem Harb, Hashel Al Lamki, Adel El Siwi, Lulwah Al Homoud, Tagreed Darghouth, Randa Maddah, Samah Shihadi, Khaled Zaki and Mohamed Abla. Works by gallery artists are held in the British Museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Barjeel Art Foundation. The gallery also runs Home from Home, an international residency programme.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
In 2003, when Maliha Tabari returned to Dubai from the United States with a BFA and an idea, the city had virtually no commercial gallery infrastructure for contemporary Middle Eastern art. She opened Artspace Dubai — later renamed Tabari Artspace — under the patronage of Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, and started visiting studios. Adam Henein in Cairo. Omar El-Nagdi. Hussein Madi. Mohamed Abla. Artists who were already making significant work and had almost no international exposure. The second exhibition the gallery hosted drew over 200 people on opening night. Twenty years later the artists Tabari built early careers around are in the collections of the British Museum, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Barjeel Art Foundation. The gallery rebranded in 2018 — same address, same DIFC building, sharper identity — and has since expanded into residencies, publications, community programming and a deliberate emphasis on female artists. Palestinian-Jordanian by background and Gulf-raised by biography, Tabari describes the most important part of her work as time spent with artists, building relationships. Everything else, she says, follows from that.
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Gate Village, Building 3, Level 2, DIFC
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Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Hazem Harb
Hazem Harb was born in Gaza, studied at the European Institute of Design in Rome where he received his MFA, and has lived and worked in the UAE for many years. His practice begins in the archive — photographs, negatives, maps, ephemera collected from the fringes of official history — and proceeds through collage assembled with geometric precision. The methodology is borrowed from early twentieth-century collagists who used the technique to make sense of catastrophe; Harb uses it for the same reason, working with material from a place that has been carved up and redrawn many times and whose story cannot be separated from the global forces that produced it. His work is held in the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has participated in Global(e) Resistance at the Centre Pompidou, Observers of Change at the Etihad Museum in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation, and Proximities at the Seoul Museum of Art.
Maitha Abdalla
Maitha Abdalla is an Emirati multidisciplinary artist whose practice crosses performance, video, installation and textile to examine adolescence, the body and transitional states. She studied at Rhode Island School of Design through the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation programme, undertook a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and participated in the AlUla Artists Residency in Saudi Arabia. She has exhibited at the Aichi Triennale 2025 in Japan, Proximities at the Seoul Museum of Art, and internationally across Europe and the Gulf. A commission for Abu Dhabi Art was presented at Cromwell Place in London. Her work has been described as existing in the slippages between soil and psyche.
Lulwah Al Homoud
Lulwah Al Homoud is a Saudi artist whose practice is rooted in the intersection of Islamic geometric tradition, calligraphy and contemporary abstraction. Working across painting, drawing and digital media, she develops compositions of dense mathematical patterning — systems built from repetition, rotation and the interval between elements — that carry both visual and conceptual weight. Her work has been exhibited at the British Museum as part of Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa; the London Design Biennale at Somerset House; the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial; Noor Riyadh; and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. She has collaborated with Diriyah Art Futures on programming around AI and visual arts.
Alymamah Rashed
Alymamah Rashed is a Kuwaiti visual artist who received her MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2019. Her practice moves through painting, installation and textile, exploring identity and the natural environment through the lens of her own body — negotiating female subjectivity in relation to regional folklore, everyday objects and local botanical material. She has exhibited at Tabari Artspace in Dubai, Hunna Art Gallery in Paris and Kuwait, and internationally across the Gulf. She has been commissioned by Dior and Piaget. Her work holds space between eastern and western perspectives on the female experience, grounded in the specific ecology and cultural memory of Kuwait.
Talal Al Najjar
Talal Al Najjar is an Emirati artist based between Los Angeles and Dubai. His interdisciplinary practice moves through research, archiving and distortion — recontextualising material culture, artefacts and imagery through an absurdist lens that uses defamiliarisation and the uncanny to generate new anthropological and material questions. He has shown at Tabari Artspace, Diriyah Art Futures in Riyadh, and internationally. He has spoken at the Culture Summit Abu Dhabi and participated in panels on counter-futurisms and new media arts in the Arab world. His brother Ziad Al Najjar is also an artist; they have exhibited together and maintain a shared studio, but their practices diverge significantly in sensibility and method.
Ziad Al Najjar
Ziad Al Najjar is an Emirati artist who completed his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023 on a Creative Honours Scholarship. He has exhibited in solo and dual presentations at NYU Abu Dhabi, Tabari Artspace and Bawa Gallery, and in group exhibitions across the UAE, Europe and the United States. His work is held in international private collections including the Barjeel Art Foundation. He has been commissioned by Dior. His practice and that of his brother Talal Al Najjar — with whom he shares a studio — have been described as sharing passion but diverging in outlook. Where Talal's work tends toward the archival and the distorted, Ziad's moves through painting and the material in a different register.
Aya Haidar
Aya Haidar is a Lebanese-British artist based between London and the Gulf. Her practice works across textile, embroidery, installation and video, exploring themes of labour, migration, domesticity and political resistance through the specificity of handmade craft. Embroidery is not decorative in her work — it is a site of investigation, a medium whose relationship to women's history and to the domestic carries its own politics. She has exhibited at Tabari Artspace, the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, Bischoff Weiss Gallery in London, Cubitt Arts, and 198 Gallery. She was commissioned by Abu Dhabi Art for a work presented at Cromwell Place in London.
Miramar Al Nayyar
Miramar Al Nayyar is a Jordanian artist based in Dubai whose practice spans painting, watercolour, muralism and audio-visual performance. Her work moves between the interior and the exterior — the chamber, the body, the city — and has been consistently engaged with questions of space, belonging and the architecture of feeling. She has exhibited at Tabari Artspace in solo and group presentations, the MMAG Foundation in Amman, ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, and internationally across the Gulf and Europe. She participated in Qouz Arts Fest at Alserkal Avenue with an audio-visual performance. Her solo exhibition Hujra — from the Arabic for chamber, sharing its root with stone — was presented at Alserkal Avenue in 2025.
Nasser Almulhim
Nasser Almulhim was born in Riyadh in 1988 and grew up in the Al-Malaz neighbourhood — a community populated by expat families from Sudan, Egypt and Jordan, which gave him an early and diverse window onto the Arab world. He holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of West Florida in Pensacola. He came to painting not from ambition but from necessity: a way of processing mental health challenges through colour and form, drawing from Sufism, Buddhism, Jungian psychoanalysis and Eastern mysticism simultaneously. He describes art-making as opening "the gate of self-healing." The work is vibrant, saturated, geometric and organic at once — paintings and sculptures that meditates upon the interaction between form and the human psyche. He has had public installations commissioned at ICD Brookfield Place and received a façade commission at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah. His work is in the Dubai Collection. He has been covered in GQ Middle East, Arab News and Mojeh, and participated in Art Week Riyadh and international exhibitions across the Gulf.
Chafa Ghaddar
Chafa Ghaddar was born in Ghazieh, Lebanon in 1986 and lives and works in Dubai. She studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in Beirut — BA in Fine Arts 2007, MA in Visual Arts 2009 — then in 2012 travelled to Florence to study fresco and traditional painting techniques in intensive immersion. The technique became the centre of her practice: not as historical curiosity but as a conceptual material, a medium that is simultaneously timeless and vulnerable, that holds the trace of time within its very surface. She won the Boghossian Art Prize for painting in 2014 and was artist-in-residence at Villa Empain in Brussels in 2015. She participated in Tashkeel's Critical Practice Programme in Dubai in 2018–2019. She was commissioned for the 16th Lyon Biennale in 2022, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath. She has received commissions from Hermès and Gucci, and executed public murals for the Al Safa Art and Design Library in Dubai. Her work has been shown at Tabari Artspace, Galerie Tanit in Beirut, Maraya Art Center in Sharjah and internationally.
Almaha Jaralla
Almaha Jaralla was born in 1996 and is based in Abu Dhabi. She works between painting, photography and installation, drawing from archival family photographs taken during the 1970s and 1980s in Abu Dhabi as primary material. The images — captured on Fuji cameras, tinted by their characteristic filter — become portals into a Gulf that is personal and collective simultaneously: family gatherings, desert excursions, shorelines before the bridges were built. She paints on unconventional canvases fashioned from Maawaz — traditional men's garments whose patterns originate in Aden, foregrounding her ancestral ties to Yemeni heritage. Faces recede; posture, adjacency and colour carry meaning. Previous bodies of work have honoured her grandmother Shadia and her aunt Seham. The work that followed — Crude Memory, presented under Abu Dhabi Art's Beyond Emerging Artists programme — expanded the archive into questions of settlement, belonging and the physical transformation of the Gulf. She has shown at Tabari Artspace Dubai, NYU Abu Dhabi Project Space, and in Seoul at the Proximities exhibition presented by the Seoul Museum of Art. She was included in the Rizzoli publication +971 in 2025.
Tagreed Darghouth
Tagreed Darghouth was born in Saida, Lebanon in 1979. She studied painting and sculpture at the Lebanese Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut, then continued at the Ayloul Summer Academy at Darat Al Funoun in Amman with Marwan Kassab Bachi, and at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. She won first prize at the cm3 competition at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris in 2003. Her paintings work with subjects that Lebanese society would prefer not to examine directly — the obsession with cosmetic surgery, the social dynamics introduced by migrant domestic workers, the body as a site of cultural pressure and transformation. The work is figural, psychologically charged, and formally confident. It has been exhibited in Beirut, Dubai, Qatar, Amman, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, the United States and France.
Curators & programme
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Harriet Bardsley-Hogg
Harriet Bardsley-Hogg received her degree in the United Kingdom and has worked in the UAE since 2011. She is Managing Director of Tabari Artspace, where she oversees the gallery's operations, programme development and institutional relationships. She has been part of the gallery's growth from a single DIFC space into an international platform with residency programming and fair participation across multiple markets.
Laura Cherrie Beaney
Laura Cherrie Beaney is an author, academic and Director of Communications at Tabari Artspace, where she has worked for over a decade. She shapes the gallery's editorial voice — catalogue essays, press materials, public programming texts — and has contributed to the critical framework through which Tabari Artspace's artists are presented to international audiences. Her background spans academic writing and communications, with a sustained focus on contemporary art from the MENA region.