ArtBooth Follows 'In Transit' With Oussama Diab Solo Show in September

Lebanese founder Roger El Khoury opened ArtBooth Gallery in Abu Dhabi in 2019, with a decade of experience in the field behind him. His goal was to bring the work of established Arab artists based abroad to the UAE, and into the cultural discourse of the region.

"The gallery mainly focuses on artists not very known in the area who are of Arab descent," Khoury said. The gallery has a second branch in Seoul, South Korea, working at a different intersection between Middle Eastern and Asian art.

This summer, ArtBooth showed a group exhibition titled 'In Transit', made up of seven artists with roots in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Some are based inside their countries of origin and others abroad, but none in the UAE.

Each artist read the theme their own way, and in Khoury's eyes the works recognised the diverse Arab diaspora living in the Emirates.

According to Egypt's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, 1.3 million Egyptians were living in the UAE by the end of 2024, in a population of about 11.5 million, alongside established Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian communities.

"The UAE itself is a cosmopolitan city - it is not only Emirati. They're only [about] 10 percent of the population," Khoury said.

"We live among many different diasporas here in the UAE, so it makes sense to bring them together and highlight them in one exhibition."

Khoury chose works he believed would land with audiences in the UAE, particularly Arab diaspora audiences from the same countries as the participating artists: Wadeei Khaled, Ahmad El Badawi, Bahram Hajou, Hanibal Srouji, Jamal Bassiouni, Rania Amoudi and Yervant Hawarian. Their work turned on memory, identity and displacement.

Displacement is clearest in the work of Palestinian artists Wadeei Khaled and Rania Amoudi, who approach their homeland through different techniques. Khaled works with an abstract, geometric impulse in watercolour and ink, Amoudi more colourfully and with slightly more literal motifs, in oil on canvas.

Khaled draws on an upbringing in the West Bank's Al-Arroub Refugee Camp and Amoudi on hers in Saudi Arabia, and both are now based in Ramallah.

Khaled's series 'Diaries of a Family in Gaza' anchored the exhibition in the present, as the genocide in Gaza continues.

Amoudi's work zooms out on Palestinian society, celebrating the women who have been at the forefront of a decades-long struggle against oppression.

Representing Egypt were Jamal Bassiouni and Ahmad El Badawi, showing at ArtBooth for the first time. Bassiouni's mixed-media work explores his connection to the Mediterranean off the coast of Alexandria, where he was born and raised.

His two pieces, 'The Encounter of Silence' and 'Wild Geometry', include abstract prints of horned animals in various active stances.

El Badawi's paintings carry movement too. In 'The Land of Mangrove', two women, one standing and one kneeling, look as though they are about to walk out of the frame, Khoury pointed out, connecting the painting back to the theme.

Syrian-Kurdish artist Bahram Hajou and Lebanese artist Hanibal Srouji leaned heavily into abstraction in their portrayal of displacement. Hajou leaves his pieces untitled and his brush strokes wide, though clear enough to make out the people he paints, one from the front, the other from behind.

Srouji includes no people at all in 'From the other side', which reads as an impressionist burning sky. He is known for work that carries the physical and psychological marks of war, absence and loss.

Yervant Hawarian, a Lebanese-Syrian painter of Armenian descent, broke from abstraction with a collection of cinematic posters, a practice he began in the sixties at 15.

By the seventies he was running multiple cinemas in Lebanon, including Cinema Royal, at the height of the country's film renaissance. "It takes you back to the golden age in Lebanon, and all over the world," Khoury said, a transit back in time.

"We are all moving," Khoury said. "The people in the UAE, they move. The artists, they move. The audience, they move. We are all in transit."

'In Transit' closed on August 31. ArtBooth's next exhibition, 'Reimagined', opens on 17 September, a solo show dedicated to Syrian-Palestinian-Dutch artist Oussama Diab's reinterpretations of works by Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh.