Tabari is delighted to announce Fellow Travellers opening on 8 October. Conceived and curated by artist, author and cultural historian Professor Omar Kholeif, Fellow Travellers asks how we might re-dream the routes, flows and counter-flows of modernity through the present. Bringing together Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942, Armenian-Iranian-American); Jai Chuhan (b. 1955, Punjab, India); Luísa Correia Pereira (1945–2009, Portuguese); Lalitha Lajmi (1932–2023, Indian); Irene Scheinmann (1933–2023, Iraqi-British) and Omar Kholeif (b. Cairo, Egypt) the exhibition traces artistic journeys across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, approaching movement as a generative space for kinship, memory and aesthetic exchange.
Developed from nearly two decades of Kholeif’s research, writing and relationships with artists, the exhibition brings landmark and rarely seen works into dialogue with Kholeif’s own paintings, presented under their own name for the first time. Here, painting is a connective thread through which diasporic histories, oral traditions, symbolic languages and forms of ancestral knowledge can be recovered and reimagined. The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition publication featuring original poetry and a curatorial essay.
The Curatorial Approach
Fellow Travellers grew out of an ongoing conversation between Kholeif and gallery founder Maliha Tabari, and out of imagine/otherwise, the small press Kholeif founded in collaboration with Sternberg Press to publish pocket-sized volumes on overlooked women artists. It is the first in a series of projects through which Kholeif sets out to reconsider the constitution of modernism, and to make debates around it entirely contemporary.
The exhibition proposes painting as a site of symbolic language. Rather than presenting these artists as a movement or a school, Kholeif reads their work for the signs, gestures and colour systems that carry knowledge across generations—what they describe as “dreamwork”, a form of social imagination concerned with safeguarding aesthetic cultures from the margins of art history. All six artists have experienced some form of displacement; the exhibition treats that movement as a site of repair rather than loss.
Fellow Travellers also makes an argument about how art histories are built: by artists, for other artists. The exhibition sets these six practices out as a chain of transmission—mentorship, friendship, inheritance—and situates itself within a longer lineage of artist-led institutions, from the Vienna Secession and the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, The Kitchen in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Sharjah Art Foundation in the UAE.
The Poets
The exhibition opens with The Poets, a prose work by Kholeif that traces their family’s journeys from Africa to Britain and to the Gulf through the lens of their mother’s poetry, and her decision to give up writing out of necessity. It sets the terms for everything that follows: a show about what is carried, what is set down, and what is picked up again by others.
The Artists
Working across painting, works on paper, watercolour, etching, and mixed media, the six artists of Fellow Travellers navigated social constraint, political upheaval and geographic rupture while pursuing rigorous aesthetic enquiry. The works on view were made on journeys outward from Baghdad and Tehran, across the Mediterranean and on to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans; Kolkata, Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and New York each became a portal into the artists’ imagination.
Press release from Tabari
Image: Omar Kholeif. Ocean Intimacy (The Ancestor Dance on the Seabed). 2025–26. Oil and pigment on linen. 80 x 105 cm. Image courtesy of Tabari Artspace © Omar Kholeif
