Nahla Tabbaa

Based in Dubai, Jordanian-Bangladeshi Nahla Tabbaa is an artist working with different mediums including; urban research, the culinary arts, ceramics and drawing. Her practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. She is sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, and adventures into worlds of immateriality and the intangible. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labour intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonise. Nahla’s Creatures were conceived and created in the Clay Corner Studio in Ajman, United Arab Emirates.

Nahla is an educator and conducts her research with various institutions including Art Jameel, Frying Pan Adventures and Sharjah Art Foundation, and is co-founder of Daftar Asfar, an artist sketchbook platform that is collaborative, ephemeral, digital, yet physical, using very little resources and innovative logistics. She earned her MA in Curatorial Practice from the Bath School of Art and Design (2012), and her BFA in Sculpture from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (2009). Her work has been presented at Art Dubai 2021 as part of the Campus Art Dubai 8.0 residency and is represented by August Fifth. She is currently part of the 8th cohort of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship.