Amna AlMemari, Lubnah Ansari, Sue Ng, Andrew Riad
Open Studio Residency 2026
Dubai, UAE
NIKA Project Space is pleased to welcome the residents of the 2nd edition of Open Studios in Dubai: Amna AlMemari, Lubnah Ansari, Sue Ng and Andrew Riad. Until August 28, the selected artists will transform the ground floor of our Dubai gallery into an open studio, developing new projects in a space that remains accessible to the public throughout the residency. The program will culminate in a presentation of the resulting works in September.
We look forward to welcoming visitors interested in meeting the artists and gaining insight into their creative process. If you would like to schedule a visit during the residency, please get in touch with our team at contact@nika-projects.com or via phone +971 58 550 8052.
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Amna AlMemari is an Abu Dhabi-based artist whose practice is informed by embodiment, the transpersonal, Islamic mysticism, and questions of accessibility in art and art education. A graduate of the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, she later completed the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and received a full scholarship to pursue an MFA in Sculpture at RISD. Her work draws on Sufi traditions and explores dualities such as body and mind, matter and spirit, and the relationship between the human and the divine. | |
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Lubnah Ansari is an artist and researcher whose work explores language, transliteration, memory, and political imagination. Her recent research, developed through her thesis project Mere Dil, Mere Musafir: Afterlives of Haq at Bard College, traces the migrations and afterlives of the word haq across South Asia and Southwest Asia. Working across inscription, installation, and material experimentation, Ansari engages with ash, sand, glass, and stone to examine ephemerality, residue, and the ways meaning shifts across languages, histories, and geographies. | |
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Sue Ng is a Singaporean artist based in Dubai whose practice centres on painting, drawing, and constructed space. Through oil, ink, and mixed media, she examines how desire, identity, spectatorship, and psychological experience are shaped by interiors, social environments, and systems of looking. Her works often reconstruct fragments of real and imagined spaces into psychologically charged environments where bodies, objects, and images move between lived reality and staged fiction. | |
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Andrew Riad is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and poet whose practice brings together poetry, research, performance, archives, moving images, photography, and sound. Through his work, Riad seeks to challenge monolithic historical narratives and foreground overlooked or silenced histories. Interested in language as ritual, gesture, and collective memory, he approaches artistic practice as a space for imagination, resurrection, and the construction of alternative futures. |
The artists were be selected through our recent open call by a jury of professionals: Rahel Aima (critic, editor, and co-director of the Bayt Al Mamzar Writing Residency), Ramin Rokni Hesam (artist collective), and Katherine Volk (art specialist, cultural advisor, and managing editor of Canvas magazine).
