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View: Fellow Travellers Curated by @dromarkholeif , 8 October - January 10

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Fellow Travellers, conceived and curated by Professor @dromarkholeif .

A very special evening reception, cocktails and conversations, a year in the making.

Save the Date: 8 October, 4-8pm

Join us and discover Fellow Travellers, curated by artist, author and cultural historian Professor Omar Kholeif.

These women modernists, Sonia Balassanian, Jai Chuhan, Luísa Correia Pereira, Lalitha Lajmi and Irene Scheinmann, pursued rigorous aesthetic enquiry through social constraint, political upheaval and geographic rupture, in studios from Kolkata to Lisbon. Their work was conceived travelling outward from Baghdad or Tehran, moving across the Mediterranean and on to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, movement Kholeif approaches as a generative space for kinship, memory and aesthetic exchange. The curator advances an approach of what they term “dreamwork,” a form of social imagination that safeguards aesthetic cultures pushed to the margins of art history. Here, Kholeif shows their own paintings under their own name for the first time.

Preview: 8 October, 4 - 8pm. A reading, tour and chapbook launch as well as a dialogue between Omar Kholeif and Maliha Tabari will run 6 - 7pm

Fellow Travellers, 8 October - 30 November 2026
Tabari, DIFC, Dubai

RSVP via link in bio by @tabari_artspace

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16 days ago

Take a look at what’s coming up at Tabari this season ! by @tabari_artspace

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22 days ago

Meet the artists of Fellow Travellers: Irene Scheinmann

Born in Baghdad in 1933, painter and printmaker Irene Scheinmann made the natural landscape and the contours of the human figure the principal and interlocking subjects of her work. She trained in Julian Trevelyan’s Hammersmith studio and at Atelier 63 in Paris, and as a printmaker developed her own collogravure technique.

In Fellow Travellers, curator @dromarkholeif , who has worked extensively with her estate, summons Scheinmann’s work to view, reading her landscapes through empathy and dislocation. Displaced from Baghdad to Britain, she compressed distance into rock formations and curving horizons; sediments of rock suggest sensuous reclining bodies while an outstretched tree trunks turn to animate botany, twisting and curling into a Dance of Life.

Scheinmann exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Barbican Centre in London, and her work is in public and private collections internationally.

Fellow Travellers, curated by Dr Omar Kholeif

8 October 2026 to 10 January 2027
Preview Thursday 8 October, 4 to 8pm
Tabari, Gate Village Building 3, Level 2, DIFC, Dubai
RSVP via link in bio by @tabari_artspace

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2 days ago

In this explosive Season 1 finale of #StudioVisit, the tables turn as co-host @dromarkholeif steps into the hot seat, becoming the ultimate subject of enquiry.

Moving through spaces of intense vulnerability, displacement, and institutional critique, Kholeif lays bare the raw mechanics of an artistic life—from the painful labour of world-making and the constant shift and drift of identity contortion. The haunting nostalgia of Mariah Carey ballads sits alongside the unbridled dream found in the artist’s voice.

Recorded live across their London studios, the street, and public transit, this raw, unfiltered dialogue unpicks the boundary between artist, curator and creator, asking what it truly means to survive the world of art when a presence alone might just become a revolutionary act unto itself.

Hosted and produced by @levin.haegele in association with @tabari_artspace

The Season Finale was published to coincide with Fellow Travellers, Dubai and Afterglow: Residue from a Departed Sun, Frieze, No. 9 Cork Street, London.

Vocal stylings: by @dromarkholeif, circa 2017-2024.

Theme Tune: Stellar’s Sea Cow by CleckHuddersfax. Courtesy of our friend, @LawrenceAbuHamdan.

Studio Visit is an artPost21 Production. by @tabari_artspace

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3 days ago

Published by artPost Books to accompany Fellow Travellers, conceived and curated by @dromarkholeif , this limited-edition volume brings together original poetry and a curatorial essay on the six artists of the exhibition: Sonia Balassanian, Jai Chuhan, Luísa Correia Pereira, Lalitha Lajmi, Irene Scheinmann and Omar Kholeif.

Its cover, takes its influence from the earth. Embossed with concentric arcs traced in orange, the lines might read as sound waves of varying frequency and intensity, radiating outward like the routes, flows and counter-flows the exhibition sets in motion.

Designed by @levin.haegele , the embossing also references the Omarolluk, or ‘omars’, a rare glacial stone known for its hemispherical grooves and received in Inuit tradition and culture, and follows the gift of such a stone from the artist Amara Karapas.

The publication launches at the opening on Thursday 8 October, with a reading, tour and book launch from 6 to 7pm, followed by a dialogue between Omar Kholeif and Maliha Tabari.

RSVP link in bio by @tabari_artspace

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4 days ago

Meet the artists of Fellow Travellers: @jai_chuhan

Having moved to the United Kingdom from Punjab as a child and trained at the @sladeschool , Jai Chuhan has long painted interiors in which female figures find breath, pause and air, rooms of dense colour where the act of painting is a process of constant negotiation.
In Fellow Travellers, her oils on canvas and linen appear as what the curator @dromarkholeif considers ‘arrangements in mood’, works that draw on antiquity as much as they do on contemporary painting, with motifs that gesture towards Francis Bacon and Peter Doig. Kholeif was particularly struck by their ‘lure of colour’ and the way they brim with sensuality and innocence at once, by the cinematic roundness and distance of canvases often worked on for years at a time, and by how they place memory in dialogue with ancient museological histories, spectral light and shadow.

Fellow Travellers, curated by Dr Omar Kholeif 8 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 Preview Thursday 8 October, 4 to 8pm by @tabari_artspace

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4 days ago

Luísa Correia Pereira, works on paper (1979)

Luísa Correia Pereira (1945-2009) made these works on paper in 1979, at the height of a practice driven by what those close to her called the “sheer joy of colour.”

A singular figure in Portuguese late-modernism, she filled her surrealist landscapes with animals and invented creatures drawn with a child’s openness to play. Poetry, cosmology, and the natural world run through everything she made. These sheets brim with warmth and invention, a reminder of how freely the imagination might roam.

You can discover Luísa’s work at Fellow Travellers, curated by @dromarkholeif , opening October 2026. by @tabari_artspace

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2 months ago

Meet the artists of Fellow Travellers: Sonia Balassanian

Sonia Balassanian arrived in the experimental milieu of 1970s New York by way of the University of Pennsylvania, the Pratt Institute and the Whitney Independent Study Program, where Robert Rauschenberg was among her teachers, she went on to be recognised as a pioneer of Lyrical Abstraction.

On view in Fellow Travellers are her large, textured paintings realised through a laborious process of underpainting and layering, their surfaces dense with forms that resemble calligraphy yet resist fixed meaning. Our curator, @dromarkholeif , who has written extensively on her work, finds in them “libraries of alphabets, scripts, cuneiform-like shapes,” an unreadable script that invites each viewer to invent their own lexicon and stands as a metaphor for a mother tongue remade in diaspora.

Sonia has exhibited at the @themuseumofmodernart and @SculptureCenter in New York, and at the @venice.art.biennale .

Fellow Travellers, curated by Dr Omar Kholeif 8 October 2026 to 10 January 2027 Preview Thursday 8 October, 4 to 8pm
RSVP via the link in bio by @tabari_artspace

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7 days ago

Irene Scheinmann, On the Brink (1970s), oil on canvas

A rare figurative work from an artist who typically turned to landscape, Irene Scheinmann’s On the Brink dates from the 1970s, the period in which she was working through the languages of late European modernism. The reclining body, here, captures the weight of the world, its pressures dispersed into planes of ochre, scarlet, royal blue and ivory against a field of midnight blue.

You can discover Irene’s work at Fellow Travellers, curated by @dromarkholeif , opening October 2026. by @tabari_artspace

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3 months ago

“Fellow Travellers kickstarts a decade-long commitment of re-dreaming — of suturing wounds, treading along errant paths, mending broken folds, both personal and historical. All are part of an act of imagining otherwise—of female worlding. For this reason, and many more, I choose to dedicate this project to my mother, and to hers.”

—Dr Omar Kholeif

Meet @dromarkholeif the artist and visionary behind Fellow Travellers, a year in the making.

Artist, author, curator and cultural historian. Born in Cairo, raised between Glasgow, Los Angeles and Saudi Arabia, Omar returned to Scotland at 17 and is now Professor in the School of Fine Art at the @glasgowschoolart .

Fellow Travellers draws on nearly 20 years of their research, writing and friendships with artists, and takes root from the notion Omar terms dreamwork: the aesthetic labour of dreaming, and of safeguarding cultures marginalised within art history.

Swipe to discover more.

Fellow Travellers
Conceived and curated by Omar Kholeif
Tabari, DIFC
Opening 8 October
RSVP via link in bio by @tabari_artspace

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10 days ago

85 Seconds to Midnight saw @mohamedmonaiseer engage in new experiments with materiality. In these works, he incorporates khayamiya, a traditional Egyptian appliqué textile practice, into the surfaces of his works, bringing inherited forms of creation into contact with the visual language of the present. Cut, layered and embedded within fields of acrylic and rusted iron, the textiles carry associations of domestic life, memory and cultural continuity. by @tabari_artspace

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14 days ago

Fellow Travellers, Conceived and Curated by Professor Omar Kholeif

Featuring: Sonia Balassanian, Jai Chuhan, Luísa Correia Pereira, Lalitha Lajmi, Irene Scheinmann and Omar Kholeif.

We get to know the mind behind our forthcoming exhibition, Fellow Travellers. Developed from nearly two decades of Omar’s research, writing and friendships with artists, Fellow Travellers asks how we might re-dream the routes, flows and counter-flows of modernity through the present.

Opening: 8 October, 4 - 8pm, with a reading, tour and chapbook launch followed by a dialogue between Omar Kholeif and Maliha Tabari. by @tabari_artspace

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16 days ago