Opening on May 4, 2023, the second exhibition on view at NIKA Project Space brings together conceptual artists from non-Western regions, probing the correlation between post-Soviet and hyper-capitalist societies through key themes of alienation, artistic labor and repetitive gestures.
On View: May 4 – July 16, 2023
April 24, 2023 (Dubai, UAE) – NIKA Project Space, Dubai’s new art and culture platform, presents its second exhibition ‘Coded Gestures’ on view from May 4 – July 16, 2023. Curated by art critic and researcher Nadine Khalil, the exhibition follows the gallery’s mission of supporting cross-cultural dialogues, pairing artists from Central and East Asia with local UAE-based artists. The works, ranging from sculpture to video and photography, function as apparatuses for understanding the context of gestures hidden behind individual processes and collective structures.
Rooted in society's shared experiences, the exhibition gives voice to artists from non-Western regions, finding a common language across seemingly divergent backgrounds and traditions shaped by multinational local contexts.
The new 250 m2 industrial space designed by T.ZED Architects, presents the works of five conceptual artists: Alexander Ugay based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Minja Gu based in Seoul, South Korea, along with UAE-based artists Fatma Al Ali, Mona Ayyash and Khalid. These contemporary artists translate the creative gesture into a means of invisible labor, exploring it as a source of repetitive vocabularies, ultimately becoming a compelling way to look at the disciplining of bodies and forms. Distilling the idea of labor from a broader social lens to an artistic one, with its varied manifestations of alienation, the exhibition connects the idea of psychological absence with the presence and absence of the body in performance, ultimately questioning the core notion of labor itself.
The exhibition will open with a live performance of Minga Gu's House Tea de la Maison de la Casa, 2023, a tea ceremony in which the artist invites all viewers to hundreds of tea infusions, invoking the role of participatory exchange. It is presented alongside the documentation of a recent site-specific act of tea-making the artist performed in the UAE with the local community, commissioned by NIKA Project Space.
From memorized movements of Korean labor migrants in post-Soviet states seen in the video More than a Hundred Thousand Times (2019-20) to AI-generated imagery indexing major historical events affecting the Korean diaspora (Unknown Return, 2023), Alexander Ugay tackles social alienation through imaginaries and archives. His works are fittingly positioned near Fatma Al Ali’s meticulously stacked bricks, My mother told me not to collect bricks (2020), which upon closer look, reveal disparities and the embedded relationship between individual and collective systems.
“The artists in this exhibition bear witness to their changing societies, captured through daily movements. They use visual and algorithmic languages to index invisible histories, from the 1937 Korean deportation to Central Asia to a sports event that never happened,” says curator Nadine Khalil. “As we looked deeper into the works proposed by Alexander and Minja, we found that an interesting thread emerges between post-Soviet and hyper- capitalist societies, linking them in terms of consumerism, excess and residual form,” Khalil continues.
Specifically commissioned for the show, Khalid’s piece, my job is to look at the sunset, 2023, which is an incessant documentation of daily sunsets printed in real time and mounted in the gallery throughout the 44 days, documenting the artist’s habitual practice. In a similar vein, two other takes on repetition are presented with Minja Gu’s 11-hour documentation of her version of a marathon done in two days in 42.195 (2006) and Mona Ayyash’s pixelated video, Trampoline (2015) featuring athletes preparing for their jumps, over and over again. Following the gallery's focus on showing lesser known female artists, founder Veronika Berezina explains further: “These are the kinds of conversations I was interested in bringing to light when I opened NIKA Project Space, especially with women artists who should be more widely recognized.”
UAE-based Lebanese curator of the show Nadine Khalil further comments on Veronika's fresh lens on Dubai: "Veronika has a deeply considered approach to contemporary art practices. For example, we first connected over the work of a female artist in the Sharjah Biennial who presented fermented fruit as part of her project on lost histories in Palestine. Since then, there has been a synergy between our interests in research- driven performance art in different contexts. The conversations between different artists in the show have evolved out of our own exchanges and her commendable vision of linking lesser-known regions of the world."
Following the thread of conceptually driven performance art, NIKA becomes a space for a daring, boundary- pushing approach that carves a new path for experimental art forms in Dubai.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
‘Coded Gestures’ will be on view at NIKA Project Space from May 4 – July 16, 2023.
Address:
NIKA Project Space
Al Khayat Avenue, Unit 11, 19th Street Road – Al Quoz 1 First Al Khail Street, Dubai, UAE
About NIKA Project Space:
Founded in 2023 by Veronika Berezina, NIKA Project Space is a platform for artistic experiments, research and the advancement of curatorial practice in Dubai. Engaged in supporting cross-cultural exchange, NIKA Project Space promotes emerging and increasingly established artists from the Middle East and internationally through a variety of art exhibitions and initiatives. Emphasizing contemporaneity and multicultural dialogue, the space provides a critically engaged program with a focus on conceptualization, abstraction, and philosophical inquiry with a strongattention tothe works of female artists.With a daring and boundary-pushing approach to contemporary art, NIKA encourages exchange and dialogue with a range of artistic mediums, including performance, painting, photography, sculpture, installation and the digital realm. Through an interest in investigative research and experimental creative processes, NIKA invites international artists to Dubai, encouraging further dialogue across cultures and the exploration of international artistic practicelocally, elevating a global vision. NIKA’s new 250 square meters space is located in the new Al Khayat Avenue in Dubai’s industrial Al Quoz district.
About Veronika Berezina:
Veronika Berezina, the founder of NIKA Project Space, was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. After working as a tax lawyer for several years, Berezina turned to her passion for art and further developed her interest in emerging contemporary artists in St. Petersburg and internationally. This increasing curiosity in contemporary art led her to more active engagement and roles as an avid art collector and notably a patron of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Seeing the potential and opportunities in a multicultural Dubai, Berezina founded an art platform focused on cross-cultural dialogue for artists from around the world, particularly Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, enriching the collective experiences and perceptions of art internationally. With NIKA, Berezina has created a space where art speaks a language that goes beyond national borders and creativity becomes a transcendent means to bring diverse cultures together.
About Nadine Khalil:
Nadine Khalil is an independent art critic, editor and researcher, curator. She is currently researching the body as an expanded site of performance and labour in the Gulf and Mediterranean region. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she advises art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut and the NYUAD Arts Center on editorial strategy, content development and publications. She is the former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017-2020) and the Beirut-based magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010- 2016). Her writing can be found in Art Agenda, Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, FT Arts, Frieze, Ocula and the Women’s Review of Books. She has authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d'Artistes) on Lebanese artists Samir Sayegh, Hanibal Srouji and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, and curated for European film festivals such as MidEast Cut and the Arab Independent Film Festival.
About Mona Ayyash:
Mona Ayyash (b. 1987, Kuwait City) is a Palestinian visual artist, raised in Dubai. Her practice focuses on repetition, memorisation, slowness, and boredom. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her work was exhibited at the Jameel Art Centre in 2021 and in Maraya Art Center, as part of the UAE Unlimited programme in 2019. She took part in the homebound residency with 421 in 2020 and was an artist-in-residence at the Alserkal Residency for their Fall 2017 cycle. She has participated in several group exhibitions such as, ‘The Distance from Here’ at Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2022, ‘Tashweesh’ at Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE in 2019 and ‘Loaning Sister Cities’ at Casino Artspace, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 2016.
About Fatma Al Ali:
Fatma Al Ali (b.1994, UAE) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores diverse themes such as perception, materiality, memory, weight, and tension in her artwork. She examines societal constraints and the human condition while paying close attention to the form and texture of her creations. Her approach is marked by a delicate balance between strength and delicacy, and she often challenges conventional notions of what materials can be used for. Al Ali earned a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Sharjah in 2018 and was awarded the Salama int Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF) program in 2019, a collaboration with Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been showcased in several group exhibitions, including ‘Getting over the color green’ at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai a collaboration with Engage101, 2023, Sikka, Dubai, 2023, ‘Community and Critique’ at Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi in 2020, ‘Printmaking Exposium’ at 4bid gallery, Netherlands in 2019, ‘Exit: Extension’ at the Maraya Art Center, Sharjah, UAE in 2018.
About Minja Gu:
Minja Gu (b. 1977, Korea). Minja Gu’s work is based on personal performances that observe and question daily behaviors, which in turn are projected through various media including photography, video, installation, and drawing. She majored in painting at Hongik University and philosophy at Yonsei University and received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Korea National University of Arts. She participated in the SSamzie Space studio program in Seoul, the Hangar Residency for artists in Barcelona, the International Studio & Curatorial Program at ISCP in NYC, and the HISK program in Ghent from 2015–2016. She received the award of excellence by the Songeun Art Award in 2010. Selected solo exhibitions include ‘Identical Times’ at Croft Gallery, Seoul, Korea, in 2009, ‘Atlantic-Pacific co.’ at Moore Street Market, New York in 2011, and ‘Inside the Belly of Monstro’ at Citadellaan 7, Ghent in 2018. Gu has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Taipei Biennale at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2008 and New Visions New Voices at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon in 2013. In 2018, Gu was selected as one of the four sponsored artists for the Korea Artist Prize, an annual award and exhibition co-organized by MMCA and SBS Foundation.
About Khalid:
Khalid (b. 1996, Dubai) is an artist, walking, running, cycling and driving. He examines the materiality of everyday objects and coaxes out their metaphoric potential. Through fabricating receipts, playing with street cats, composing fictional tours and stealing corporate pens, he dissects ironies embedded in his everyday surroundings. What begins as an arbitrary flânerie, develops into a methodical formula that addresses philosophical and phenomenological, revealing the spatial, poetic relationships between his subjects and their frangible correlation to human beings. Khalid is an alumnus of programs Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and Campus Art Dubai 7.0 with previous group shows in Yorkshire, Jeddah and Abu Dhabi.
About Alexander Ugay:
The third-generation of Koryoin (ethnic Korean in the former Soviet Union), Alexander Ugay (b. 1978, Kazakhstan) uses photography, video, and collage to document stories about individuals and groups, migration histories, nostalgia originating in past experience, and places where past and future coexist. In the 2000s, he produced his “cinema-object” series of short films shot on 8mm and 16mm cameras produced during the Soviet era; since 2017, he has created his own “obscuratons,” devices based on the pinhole camera approach that he uses for artistic series in which he locates historically and ideologically important settings in order to capture spatial and temporal continua. His major solo exhibitions include ‘Topology of Image’ at Aspan Gallery, Almaty in 2018 and ‘More than an Image, Less than an Object’ at Galeria Labirynt, Lublin in 2017. Ugay has shown his work at the Busan Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2022, Art Sonje Center in Seoul in 2020, Sapar Contemporary in New York in 2019, Lunds Konsthall in Sweden in 2018, and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2016. His work is part of international private and public collections. The latter includes Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland; National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana and Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden.
Image Credits:
1.Minja Gu. Inside the Belly of Monstro. Video Still. 2015-2023. Courtesy of the artist.
2.Alexander Ugay. Unknown Return. Various dimensions. 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
3.Mona Ayyash. Trampoline.Single channel digital video. 2015. Courtesy of the artist.