NIKA Project Space
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to NIKA Project Space.
Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Rain Wu
Taiwanese artist who considers how maps and infrastructure shape the places they describe, working with materials such as seawater and salt to address geography, extraction and environmental change. (Source: NIKA Project Space)
Rajni Perera
Sri Lankan-born artist based in Toronto. Her paintings and sculptures draw on mythology, dream imagery and hybrid beings, reflecting on migration, transformation and resistance and using imagined worlds to rethink relationships between people, other species and their environments. (Source: NIKA Project Space)
Sancintya Mohini Simpson
Australian artist whose work draws on her maternal family's history as descendants of Indian indentured labourers sent to colonial sugar plantations in South Africa, considering how displacement, labour and inherited trauma become embedded in land and memory. (Source: NIKA Project Space)
Soma Surovi Jannat
Bangladeshi artist whose large-scale scrolls trace the relationships between people, animals, plants, land and water, notably in the Sundarbans mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta, foregrounding ecological knowledge and the cultural histories of its communities. (Source: NIKA Project Space)
Karan Shrestha
Nepali artist and filmmaker whose video works examine land, power and displacement, such as Stealing Earth (2018) on Indigenous communities displaced by the expansion of Chitwan National Park. (Source: NIKA Project Space)
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.