Fellow Travellers

Fellow Travellers is a group exhibition of six artists, conceived and curated by Omar Kholeif, at Tabari Artspace in Gate Village, DIFC, Dubai. It runs from 8 October to 30 November 2026.

The works span painting, works on paper, watercolour, etching and mixed media. The gallery places the works on journeys outward from Baghdad and Tehran, across the Mediterranean and on to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The cities it names are Kolkata, Lisbon, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and New York. "Fellow Travellers is a parcel, a constitutive act of worlding, of dreaming," Kholeif writes. A limited-edition publication with original poetry and a curatorial essay accompanies the show.

Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942), an Armenian-Iranian-American painter, studied at the University of Pennsylvania, the Pratt Institute and the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has shown at the Museum of Modern Art and SculptureCenter in New York and at the Venice Biennale. Jai Chuhan (b. 1955, Punjab, India) moved to the United Kingdom as a child and trained at the Slade School of Fine Art. She paints interiors with female figures in oil and lives in London.

Luísa Correia Pereira (1945 to 2009) was a Portuguese artist. The show includes large paintings on paper she made in Paris in the 1970s, newly released by her estate and never previously exhibited. They hang with a large celestial painting from the 1980s. Lalitha Lajmi (1932 to 2023) was a Kolkata-born painter and printmaker known for panoramic watercolours. Irene Scheinmann, née Ruben Karady (1933 to 2023), was displaced from Baghdad to Britain and painted landscapes of rock formations and curving horizons. This is the first presentation of her work in the Arabic-speaking world.

Omar Kholeif was born in Cairo and is Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. Their studio has been in London since 2020. Fellow Travellers is the first time Kholeif's paintings are shown under their own name.