Tabari Artspace is currently hosting Same Air / نفس الهواء, a group exhibition shaped less by a prescribed curatorial theme than by a shared point in time. Bringing together fourteen artists from the Gulf, the show displays works made in response to a moment of disruption, offering a snapshot of how artists across the region process, interpret, and translate the atmosphere around them. Presented online and in the gallery, the exhibition is open until 1 September 2026.
The premise of the show is deliberately open-ended. According to Tabari Artspace, the participating artists returned to their studios without a formal directive and produced works that remain “unfinished, unresolved, and in motion.” Their connection lies in the circumstances under which they were made: the same place, the same moment, and, metaphorically, the same air. The resulting exhibition captures a particular regional atmosphere while resisting the idea that a shared experience necessarily produces a uniform response.
Among the creatives featured in the exhibition are Emirati artists Maitha Abdalla and Almaha Jaralla. In her practice, Abdalla uses theatrical situations and constructed characters to explore folklore, mythology, gender, social conditioning, and psychology. Almaha Jaralla, who works with pigment on textile, creates paintings that draw on the lived textures of the Gulf and inherited histories. She depicts everyday gatherings and gestures and allows faces and specific details to recede, this way emphasising posture, colour, and relationships between figures.
Kuwaiti artist Alymamah Rashed similarly investigates the relationship between the body and its surroundings. In her work, she examines questions of identity, female subjectivity, folklore, and the natural environment, often incorporating botanical finds, shells, and everyday objects.
The exhibition also includes several established figures whose practices have long contributed to contemporary art discourse in the region. Pioneering Saudi artist and curator Lulwah Al Homoud is known for transforming Arabic calligraphy and elements of Islamic visual culture into mathematically structured abstract compositions. Saudi painter and sculptor Nasser Almulhim approaches abstraction through colour, geometry, and organic forms. He considers the psychological and spiritual effects of colour, treating the act of painting as a form of intuitive exploration. His highly saturated artworks investigate the relationship between inner states and visual energy.
Lebanese artist Chafa Ghaddar brings another material language to the exhibition. Fresco, wall painting, and surface treatment are central to her practice. Interested in the traces of time embedded in surfaces, she uses fresco’s simultaneous durability and fragility to explore fragmentation, memory, and the relationship between past and present. Also featured is another Lebanese artist, Tagreed Darghouth, whose practice examines human relationships, social structures, and the contradictions embedded in contemporary life.
British-Lebanese artist Aya Haidar transforms found and discarded objects into poetic constructions concerned with labour, displacement, domesticity, womanhood, and memory. Her work often focuses on the histories contained within aged and culturally specific objects, linking personal and collective memory through processes of recycling and reconstruction.
Palestinian artist Hazem Harb approaches memory through archival research and collage. Working with photographs, maps, and other historical materials, he fragments and reconstructs visual records to reconsider how histories are preserved and understood. Meanwhile, in his practice, Jawad Al Malhi, also from Palestine, examines communities, environments, and the choreography of crowds.
Emirati-American artists Ziad and Talal Al Najjar bring distinctly contemporary approaches to the exhibition. Ziad’s paintings, which move between abstraction and figuration, explore materiality, perception, and interconnected systems of body, nature, and spirituality. Talal, meanwhile, works across sculpture, video, sound, CGI animation, painting, and installation; he combines archival research with distortion, irony, and the uncanny. His interests include simulation, counter-futurism, and the strange relationship between contemporary technology and material culture.
The exhibition’s geographical and generational breadth expands further through Iraqi artist Miramar Al Nayyar, whose multidisciplinary practice examines movement, language, memory, and abstraction, and Emirati conceptual artist Zeinab Alhashemi, famous for transforming local and industrial materials into site-specific installations that consider the changing relationship between people and the Gulf landscape.
Same Air is about recognising the coexistence of different perspectives. By bringing art practitioners together under shared circumstances and allowing their individual languages to remain distinct, Tabari Artspace presents the exhibition as a living record of the present. Its unfinished quality is therefore significant: rather than treating art as a definitive statement, Same Air captures the moment when experience is still being absorbed, translated, and given form.
To get more information about Same Air, please go to the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting the Summer Vibes group show.
