Infrared

NIKA Project Space, Dubai, is pleased to present Infrared, the culmination of the second edition of its Open Studio programme, opening on September 9, 2026.

 

Throughout the summer, NIKA Project Space transformed its gallery into a working studio, inviting four artists based in the UAE to develop new bodies of work in dialogue with the space, one another, and the public. Curated by Rahel Aima, who was also a member of the Open Studio selection committee, the exhibition brings together projects developed during the residency around the observer effect, in which a wave becomes a particle and the body becomes a tongue through ritual, accumulation, and the heat of the eye.

 

Rather than producing works in response to a prescribed theme, the participating artists continued investigations proposed during the Open Studio application process. Over the course of the residency, these projects evolved through experimentation, research, conversation, and material exploration, offering a glimpse into artistic practice as an unfolding process.

 

Dubai-based Singaporean artist MG presents new paintings from her ongoing series Collecting the Collectors, which examines the private interiors of art collectors as psychologically charged spaces where identity and power are negotiated through objects and images. Drawing from real interiors while deliberately disrupting their spatial logic, her paintings transform domestic settings into unstable environments in which artworks, decorative objects, and their owners become participants in an intricate theatre of collecting and self-construction.

 

Andrew Riad expands his multidisciplinary research into dance, ancient Egyptian mythology, and the material history of copper through an installation combining painting, sculpture, text, and ritual gesture. Rooted in the figure of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess associated with music, dance, copper mining, and the passage between life and death, the project interweaves personal memory, Coptic funerary traditions, and the persistence of language. Copper, roses, milk, water, and movement recur throughout the installation and individual objects, connecting ideas of ancestry, spirituality, and cultural survival.

 

Lubnah Ansari continues the material investigations initiated through her recent research project Mere Dil, Mere Musafir: Afterlives of Haq. Her practice considers the migrations and transformations of the word haq across South and Southwest Asia, approaching language as a material capable of translation and renewal. Working with ash, stone, sand, glass, photography, and found objects, Ansari develops sculptural and photographic works that reflect on memory and the ways meaning persists across histories and geographies.

 

Emirati artist Amna AlMemari presents a new chapter in her ongoing exploration of Tarflowers, a fictional ecosystem that draws on the landscapes and visual culture of the Gulf. Combining photography, drawing, and mixed media, she imagines fields of hybrid forms that operate simultaneously as camouflage and adaptation. Oscillating between fiction and observation, her works construct speculative environments where geological, political, and media narratives become layered into new visual ecologies.

 

The Open Studio programme reflects NIKA Project Space’s ongoing commitment to supporting artists through research, experimentation, and the production of new work. By opening the gallery as a working studio throughout the summer, the programme invited audiences into the often-invisible stages of artistic production, culminating in an exhibition that foregrounds process as much as its material outcomes.