Curatorial Ethos
NIKA Project Space is a contemporary art gallery founded by Veronika Berezina, opened in March 2023 on Al Khayat Avenue in Dubai's Al Quoz district, a short walk from Alserkal Avenue. Spanning 250 square metres across two floors — designed by T.ZED Architects — the gallery is dedicated to conceptual, abstract and philosophically driven art, with a defining emphasis on female artists and on artists and curators from the Global South. Beyond exhibitions, it runs a programme of talks, performances and a research strand that invites artists to develop new, research-based and experimental work, often addressing societal experience and historical memory. Its roster and projects have included Mirna Bamieh, Muhannad Shono, Alexander Ugay, Katya Muromtseva, Nika Neelova, Polina Kanis, Adrian Pepe, Fatma Al Ali and Dalia Khalife. In 2024 NIKA opened a second location in the Komunuma art district near Paris, extending its programme into Europe.
Why this gallery matters
Exhibo editorial
NIKA Project Space was built around a deliberate imbalance it set out to correct. Its founder opened it to give women equal representation on the gallery wall — still rare even as the number of women in the art world grows — and to centre artists and curators from the Global South, pairing that with a commitment to conceptual art, the most idea-driven and least decorative end of the field. That is a specific, demanding programme, and it places NIKA among the more intellectually serious spaces in the city rather than among the market-facing galleries. The structure backs up the stance. NIKA runs a research programme that commissions new, experimental work, treating the gallery as a site of enquiry as much as sale — its co-commission with a Dutch museum on a Palestinian artist's work on displacement is the kind of project that signals museum-level ambition. And by opening a Paris space in 2024, it did something few Dubai galleries have: carried its artists, many of them from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, directly into one of the world's principal art capitals. For a Dubai positioning itself as a cross-cultural hub, a gallery that exports the region's conceptual and female voices to Europe is doing exactly the connective work the scene needs.
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Address
Unit 11, Al Khayat Avenue, Al Quoz 1
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Artists & People
Full directory →Founders
Gallery founders and founding directors.
Curators & programme
Curatorial team and exhibition programming.
Nadine Khalil
Nadine Khalil is a Lebanese, Dubai-based art critic, editor and independent curator, and one of the more established critical voices working in the Gulf. Her path into art came through the social sciences — her academic background is in anthropology — followed by nearly two decades in arts publishing. She was editor of the Dubai contemporary-art magazine Canvas (2017–2020) and earlier held senior editorial roles at the Beirut magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010–2016), and her criticism appears across the field's leading titles: Artforum, ArtReview Asia, The Art Newspaper, art-agenda, Ocula, The Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, FT and the Women's Review of Books. Beyond journalism she works as a curator and researcher, currently focused on the body as an expanded site of performance and labour, and collaborates with artists engaging performance, technology and the non-human world. She has authored a series of artist monographs (Paroles d'Artistes) on Lebanese artists including Samir Sayegh and Hanibal Srouji and the late filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, edited The Arts Center: Building a Performing Arts Community on Saadiyat Island (NYU Abu Dhabi, 2023), and contributed to volumes such as Evaporating Suns: Contemporary Myths from the Arabian Gulf (Hatje Cantz, 2023). She advises institutions including the Ishara Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut and the NYUAD Arts Center on editorial strategy, mentors artists in Tashkeel's Critical Practice Programme, and previously served as communications strategist for Ishara Art Foundation (2020–2022). At NIKA Project Space she curated the group exhibition I Can No Longer Produce the Limits of My Own Body.
Marina Vinogradova
Marina Vinogradova is an art historian, curator and art adviser with over a decade in contemporary art, and a curator and manager at NIKA Project Space across its Dubai and Paris spaces. She holds a Master's in Art History, Criticism and Conservation from Saint Petersburg State University, and built her career across notable institutions before Dubai: she was Art Director at Anna Nova Gallery in St. Petersburg — where she supported interdisciplinary, research-based practices and large-scale installations, often by young artists addressing urgent social questions — and curated the VIP Programme of the Russian office of viennacontemporary, with further experience at the Aksenov Family Foundation and RDI Creative. At NIKA she curates exhibitions, advises on acquisitions and helps shape the gallery's research-driven programme, and has spoken publicly as a commentator on the UAE art market — its capacity to build museums and buy at the top end, and the realities facing emerging artists in a young market. Her work consistently backs original, interdisciplinary practice and artists engaging with contemporary cultural issues.