Curatorial Ethos
AKKA Project (A Kostic Khachatourian Art Project) is a commercial gallery dedicated to contemporary art from the African continent and its diaspora, founded in Dubai in 2016 by Lidija Kostic Khachatourian and Kristian Khachatourian, with a second space opened in Venice in 2019. The gallery focuses primarily on emerging and experimental African artists, working closely with them to introduce their work to new geographies and international collectors. Its programme spans painting, sculpture, installation and film, presented in intimate spaces and structured around a model that extends beyond standalone exhibitions into residencies, long-term support and direct engagement with artists. Across nearly a decade the founders have explored 18 countries across Africa in building the gallery's roster, establishing AKKA as one of the region's leading platforms for contemporary African art. The Dubai gallery is located in Al Quoz; the gallery participates in regional events including Quoz Arts Fest.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
There is a specific gap AKKA Project set out to fill: contemporary African art, made by living artists across a continent of 50-plus countries, almost entirely absent from the Gulf's gallery scene. Since 2016 the gallery has built its whole identity around closing it — not by importing a few established names, but by going to find emerging and experimental artists where they work, across eighteen African countries and counting, and giving them a platform that reaches collectors in Dubai, Venice and beyond. What distinguishes the gallery is the pace at which it refuses to operate. Its model is built on slowness, care and long-term commitment rather than the churn of fair-season sales — residencies, sustained material support, and relationships with artists that outlast any single show. That patience is itself a position in a market that rewards speed, and it has made AKKA a serious bridge between African artistic ecosystems and the international art world, with the Venice space placing those artists within sight of the Biennale. For Dubai, a city defining itself as a crossroads, a gallery devoted to the depth and range of contemporary African practice adds something the scene genuinely lacked.
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Address
Warehouse 8, First Al Khail St, Al Quoz 1
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Artists & People
Full directory →Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Elias Mung'ora
Elias Mung'ora is a Kenyan painter whose work maps the urban life of Nairobi — a city he was not born in, but came to understand by moving through it. Born in 1992 in Nyeri, in central Kenya, he moved to Nairobi initially to study real estate and property management before leaving to pursue art, honing his skills partly through tattooing and self-directed practice. Though painting is his primary medium, he works fluidly across drawing, photography, printmaking and woodcut, building richly layered canvases from transfers and assemblages based on his own street photography. Beneath their everyday scenes — a wedding, a portrait session, a quiet street — his paintings carry a sharper inquiry into the fragmentation of the city, the traces left by past lives in worn and repurposed spaces, and the colonial land histories that still shape who belongs where. A member of Nairobi's Brush Tu Artist Collective, he won the 2016 Manjano Art Prize and has been a finalist in the Barclays L'Atelier and EPI competitions; his work has shown in New York, Kampala, Rennes and Venice, and entered collections including the I&M Bank Collection, with a promised work at the MFA Boston. One of his paintings even appeared in season two of HBO's Insecure.
Adeniyi Damilola
Adeniyi Damilola is a self-taught Nigerian painter whose work moves in the space between memory and emotion. Born in 1989, he began sketching as a child, inspired by his brother's drawings, and committed fully to art in 2016. Working in oils, acrylic and sand texture on canvas, he composes soft silhouettes and heavily worked surfaces that he describes as holding "stories that words cannot carry" — images built to evoke longing and remembrance rather than to depict a specific scene. The tactile, eroded quality of his canvases, where figures seem to surface and dissolve, has made his work a distinctive presence in the new wave of contemporary African painting, including at AKKA Project's 2025 Venice exhibition.
Akinbanji Osanyemi
Akinbanji Osanyemi is a Nigerian artist who blends technical realism with a conceptual sensibility. Born in 1989, he works extensively in charcoal — building atmosphere and psychological depth through tonal control alone — as well as in larger painted and mixed compositions. His imagery often stages quiet tensions between private desire and public display, using masked figures, ritual gestures and symbolic objects to explore how inner life is performed and concealed. His drawing The Indulgence (2025) and the intimate charcoal works shown through AKKA Project place him among the emerging African artists working at the meeting point of figuration and ritual.
Founders
Gallery founders and founding directors.
Lidija Kostic Khachatourian
Lidija Kostic Khachatourian is the founder of AKKA Project and one of Dubai's most prominent advocates for contemporary African art — a career she arrived at by an unlikely route. She studied and practised federal accounting in Switzerland, a world of numbers and deadlines, before moving to Dubai in 2008 with her husband Kristian to focus on family. It was there that she fell in love with art, turning a personal passion for the African continent and its art into a profession. In 2016 she opened AKKA Project in Dubai, followed by a Venice space in 2019, and has since become a recognised curatorial voice — she curated the Mozambican Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Over more than a decade she has operated with what observers describe as a quiet, deliberate consistency, centring African and diasporic artists within a model rooted in care and continuity rather than market pressure, and is regularly cited among the cultural advocates reshaping the global South's place in the contemporary art world.
Kristian Khachatourian
Kristian Khachatourian is the co-founder of AKKA Project and the person whose long relationship with Africa seeded the whole enterprise. A collector who has lived across continents — the Middle East, the Americas and Europe — he spent the 1990s based in Monrovia, Liberia, where he lived and worked for around five years and developed a deep appreciation for African culture and art. It was there that he began collecting, acquiring traditional African artefacts from 1990 onward, long before AKKA existed. That early, first-hand immersion in the continent gave him a collector's eye and a genuine connection to its art that predated the gallery by decades. When he and his wife and business partner Lidija settled in Dubai, his existing passion met her newfound love of art, and the two began travelling through sub-Saharan Africa, engaging with local artists and building a private collection that eventually became AKKA Project. Across the years the pair have explored eighteen countries on the continent together, and Kristian has been a steady force in shaping the gallery's collector-driven, relationship-first approach. In 2024 he and Lidija were jointly named among ART AFRICA magazine's 150 cultural advocates reshaping the cultural narrative of the global South.