Almaha Jaralla - Biography | Tabari Artspace

Almaha Jaralla is an Emirati painter and visual artist whose work centres on the lived textures of the Gulf and the inherited legacies that structure that life, including ancestral ties to Aden. Working predominantly in pigment on textile, she treats fabric as a material that holds the intimacy of the domestic as well as the trace of human movement across time and lineage. Her compositions restage habitual scenes and gestures from ordinary life in the region, distilling them into archetypal relations. Faces and details recede so that posture, adjacency, colour and ground become the carriers of meaning.

Jaralla’s paintings stage human motion at a small scale - pauses at roadside, collective rest, provisional gatherings - to register broader questions of belonging, settlement and social formation. Colour palettes echo the tonal drift of aged photographs, allowing temporality to surface as atmosphere rather than narrative. By compressing personal memory into simplified pictorial structures, her work shows how history persists in everyday arrangements of bodies, materials and space.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023, Seham, Tabari Artspace, UAE

2022, Shadia, Abu Dhabi Art

2022, Shadia, NYUAD Project Space, Abu Dhabi, UAE

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2025, Hot Spots, Sotheby's UAE
2023, Beyond Emerging Artists, Abu Dhabi Art, UAE

2021, Connected, Collected by Engage 101, Sotheby’s Dubai

East-East Vol.4: The Curio Shop, HB.Nezu, Tokyo, Japan

2020, Almost Home, Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi, UAE

2019, EMERGE III; Converging Lines, DD47, Venice, Italy

ART FAIRS

2025, Abu Dhabi Art, UAE
2024, Art Dubai, UAE