“Absence, and conflict aside, these artists forged a specific kind of constitution–one that afforded new breath. They hold their hearts close to the Earth. Wandering through sites of the imagination, they travelled across a myriad of trails and routes—tunnelling into a collective subconscious–one that is vivid, rich and abundant in its aesthetic possibilities.
Here, I present you with a fragment of what I call “dreamwork”--a form of social imagination that involves safeguarding aesthetic culture. Here, the diasporic imagination has reclaimed the possibilities of movement as part of an artistic method, a parcel, a constitutive act of worlding, of dreaming.”
Professor Omar Kholeif, PhD
Tabari presents Fellow Travellers, an exhibition conceived and curated from the research of award-winning author, curator, cultural historian and professor of global art theory and practice at the iconic Glasgow School of Art, Dr Omar Kholeif.
Fellow Travellers seeks to continue Tabari’s long-standing commitment to making debates around modernism entirely contemporary. To bring the past into the here and now.
Fellow Travellers stems from the possibilities of “imagining otherwise”. It is part of an ongoing conversation with Dr Omar Kholeif that emerged from Tabari’s engagement with the publishing imprint and small press, imagine/otherwise, which Kholeif conceived and developed in collaboration with Sternberg Press. The exhibition is the first of a series conceived by Kholeif, which seeks to reconsider the constitution of modernism.
Inspired by artist Simone Fattal’s notion that ‘history is a continuous movement’, the proposition is to re-claim “movement” not as an act of "dislocation" but rather, as a potential site of suture–a curative vestige into the imagination. Here, in Tabari’s DIFC galleries, a constellation of 5 significant women artists present work that was created on their journeys across from the “fertile crescent” of the Levant–across the expanse of the Mediterranean Sea and outbound to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Cities such as Baghdad and Tehran; Damascus, Beirut, and Kolkata, as well as Lisbon, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, and New York, become portals into the artists’ imagination.
The exhibition presents works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited, presenting a rare opportunity to re-examine a key moment in late modernism. The artists: Irene Scheinmann (née Ruben Karady) (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), are represented here with artworks that unfold from the unconscious mind into sumptuous colorfields, fashioning vivid abstractions, textured surfaces, and emotional landscapes, to invoke the late painter of epic worlds, Helen Frankenthaler.
Fellow Travellers is a proposal and a vital return to histories of the past, which require revisiting. It is an invitation to explore the invention of new aesthetic languages across multiple media, with the painterly horizon serving as the central connective thread within the exhibition.
Digging Deeper
Working across painting, watercolour, etching, mixed media and ceramics, these artists navigated social constraint, political upheaval and geographic rupture while advancing rigorous aesthetic enquiry. Presented here for the first time in the Arabic-speaking world is the art of the late Iraqi-British artist, Irene Scheinmann (née Ruben Karady). Her compressed rock formations and curving horizons presented in her paintings and works on paper create an ocular rift–a tense illusion between the embodied and what is concealed.
Sonia Balassanian established herself within the experimental milieu of the 1970s New York art scene after studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pratt Institute, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, where she was a student of Robert Rauschenberg, among others. During the 1970s, Balssanian became dubbed a pioneer of a painting movement referred to as “Lyrical Abstraction”, which took the art world, especially in North America, by storm. She is perhaps most famous for her large, textured, paintings, which are produced through a laboured process of underpainting and subsequently layering visual forms that resemble calligraphy. This seemingly antiquated language that cannot be read is both an invitation for the spectator to invent their own lexicon, as it is a metaphor for the diasporic experience–where language, one’s “mother tongue”, is soldered and re-constituted. Pigments of varying nature are abundant, revealing efflorescing illusions of space and place through the folds of her painterly fields. Balassanian’s career has been marked by successful exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sculpture Center, New York, as well as the Venice Biennale.
Simone Fattal is widely recognised as one of the most important artists of her generation. A polymath whose movements in ceramic, painting, and publishing create a bridge between Antiquity and our present. The founder of the Post-Apollo Press, Fattal is known as a maker of worlds and dreams, and it is her adventures that inspired Kholeif with the courage to envisage the possibility of what it would mean to imagine/otherwise–to seek to look into the margins, at the errata, and beyond, to reconceive of history’s ongoing dance.
Luísa Correia Pereira has been the subject of 5 years of intense archival research by Professor Kholeif and is the subject of a forthcoming monograph and major museum touring presentation curated by Kholeif and a group of research allies. Presented here are a series of rare large paintings on paper from the 1970s, produced while the artist was still living in Paris. Inspired by the late philosophical writing of Heidegger and his concept of the ‘fourworld’--these artworks suggest a world where the human and the celestial are connected, where nature becomes one with the human through whirling gesture and colour that invoke cosmology. These newly released works by the Estate have never previously been exhibited before. Accompanying them is a large 1980s celestial painting that bridges multiple references: Native American history, Brazilian ecological and indigenous activism, with the wanton desires of the human subconscious.
Tabari’s presentation Fellow Travellers, forms part of a wider commitment to revisiting overlooked practices and restoring marginalised and/or dispossessed voices into historical view. By assembling these artists in dialogue, the gallery builds connections across generations and geographies, repositioning diasporic women artists within the central narratives of twentieth-century art.
Fellow Travellers opens 13 April 2026 at Tabari, DIFC, and ends 5 June 2026.
Further Reading
Read and collect from Dr Omar Kholeif’s publishing imprint, imagine/otherwise–pocket-sized books on overlooked women artists, co-published with Sternberg Press. You can acquire volumes on Lalitha Lajmi, Simone Fattal and Sonia Balassanian. Forthcoming in autumn is a volume on Luísa Correia Pereira.