SHAMSA

Shamsa is a series of time-based interventions which explore the passage of time through the impact of the sun.

Bringing together the artist’s visual and culinary practices, this publication features recipes derived from ingredients dried on the roof of Jameel Arts Centre. Tabbaa uses recipe-writing as a means to draw up analogies and metaphors. Nonhuman beings are personified, given a wide range of feelings and put through evocative processes echoing emotional states, such as uprooting. Her recipes are both instructional and poignant: they evoke a culture of sharing and display a complex knowledge of the materials at hand.


Tabbaa’s interventions, gathered in this artist’s book, act as sundials, as time tellers, measuring the passage of time through the sun. In a city where everyone looks forward to the cooler months, a softer sun signaled the end of the artist’s process.

NahlaTabbaa:

 (b. 1986, Amman, Jordan) an artist whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organizing agency of materials, she adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labor intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonize her otherwise fast-paced life.

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). She previously led and developed the community programme at Sharjah Art Foundation, and currently develops education projects independently and in collaboration with institutions including Art Jameel, Warehouse 421, and the Beacon House National Trust University. She was previously a culinary navigator and researcher at Frying Pan Adventures; is the co-founder of The Alchemy of Dyeing; Forsa School; a critical and professional programme for artists and Daftar Asfar; a sketchbook publishing collective. Her work has been presented at Art Dubai (2018, 2020), the 8th cohort of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2021), Jameel Arts Centre Park Projects (2021) and is represented by Beyyn. In the publishing world she has self published, published the works of others and continues to engage in experimental writing, illustration and research. Shamsa, her first published recipe book, was commissioned by Art Jameel in 2021. In the culinary world she has led performance dinners and explorations at 421 with Moza al Matrooshi, Al Serkal Avenue, Art Dubai with Fernando Garcia Dory, Myocum and Amman Design Week, and has curated Sufra with Frying Pan Adventures and Rewilding the Kitchen with Al Serkal Online. She has presented recipes and culinary research which have featured in EastEast Magazine, The Confused Arab, Deep Fried, Al Serkal Online and Attempting Abla Nazira.