Curatorial Ethos
The gallery's programme focuses on painting-led practices and artists whose work reflects layered geographies, diasporic histories, and shifting cultural contexts between the Global South and the West. It aims to introduce international artists to the Middle East region while fostering institutional and critical dialogues around artistic practices unfolding across these regions.
Taymour Grahne Projects is a contemporary art gallery on Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, founded in New York in 2013 by Finnish-Lebanese dealer Taymour Grahne. After twelve years of nomadic programming between New York and London, the gallery opened its first permanent space — 2,000 square feet in Dubai's leading art district — in September 2025, alongside a London office. The programme bridges artists from the MENA region and its diasporas with an international contemporary roster: Daniele Genadry, Amy Lincoln, Ala Younis, Samira Abbassy, Dominique Fung and Latifa Alajlan, among others. Grahne describes the space as a project space rather than a gallery — built for artist talks, sustained engagement and the kind of programming that comes from being genuinely present in a scene rather than passing through it.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
Taymour Grahne spent twelve years refusing to have a permanent space. Not because he couldn't — because he didn't want to. He operated nomadically, moving between New York and London, hosting shows in borrowed spaces and unconventional venues, building a roster of more than fifty artists through relationships rather than real estate. The model worked. The programming was sharp. The artists were right. Then in September 2025 he opened 2,000 square feet on Alserkal Avenue and called it a project space, not a gallery. The distinction matters to him. "I don't want to represent artists, I want to collaborate with them," he has said. "Let's have coffee and walk around the show." For a dealer who is Finnish-Lebanese, who has spent his career moving between cultures and working with artists from the MENA region and its diasporas alongside an international roster, Alserkal was less a new market than a return to something. "Opening here feels like coming home," he said. The inaugural show was a solo by American painter Gail Spaien — meticulously composed interiors, painting as emotional exchange. An unexpected choice for a debut in Dubai, which is exactly the kind of choice Taymour Grahne tends to make.
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Warehouse D31-A, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1
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Artists & People
Full directory →Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Katia Kameli
Katia Kameli (b. 1973, Clermont-Ferrand, France) is a French-Algerian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. Her research-based practice explores cultural and historical intersections, weaving the political and the poetic together to reflect on complex narratives of identity, memory and belonging. Grounded in both French and Algerian culture, she examines the blind spots of history and acts as an intermediary and 'translator' between geographies, questioning prevailing power structures and the visual languages through which power is defined. Her work is an ongoing act of rewriting that pairs political inquiry with a lyrical sensibility, proposing alternative narratives that challenge dominant discourses. Kameli has presented solo exhibitions across France and internationally, at venues including the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Berlin and Stuttgart), Institut des Cultures d'Islam and Bétonsalon (Paris), FRAC Sud (Marseille), Kalmar Konstmuseum, Kunsthalle Münster, Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain (Brest), the Rennes Biennale, FRAC Île-de-France, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow) and The Mosaic Rooms (London). Group exhibitions include MACBA (Barcelona), Louvre Abu Dhabi, MAC VAL, the Bergen Assembly, MUCEM, the Gulbenkian Foundation, BPS22 and the Centre Pompidou.
Dalal Al-Obaidi
Dalal Al-Obaidi (b. 1996, Kuwait) is a painter whose practice engages questions of memory, place and identity, often through figurative compositions that blur the line between the personal and the collective. Her paintings move between psychological interiority, social structures and the outside world with sensitivity and restraint, using the body, gesture and spatial tension to explore lived experience within and beyond contemporary Kuwaiti society. Al-Obaidi studied at Central Saint Martins in London and lives and works in Kuwait. Her solo presentations include Time to Go at Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2024) and Frogs, Jazz & Blisters at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai (2026). She has also shown in group exhibitions including Five Painters at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai (2026), I Am Not What I Am, I Become at Athr Gallery, Jeddah (2026), the MA Interim Show at Central Saint Martins, London (2025), and Threads in Lincoln, UK (2024).