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NIKA Project Space — gallery cover

Alserkal AvenueDubai

NIKA Project Space

Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to NIKA Project Space.

Founders

Gallery founders and founding directors.

Veronika Berezina

Veronika Berezina

Founder

Veronika Berezina is a collector, patron and gallerist, and the founder of NIKA Project Space in Dubai and Paris. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, she came to the art world by an indirect route: she studied International Relations for her bachelor's and master's at the Moscow State University of International Relations, taking art-history and collecting courses alongside her degrees, and worked afterwards as an international tax lawyer. Art remained the constant — she travelled to exhibitions and biennials worldwide, began collecting in 2013 (first emerging artists in St. Petersburg, then international names), studied further at Sotheby's Institute of Art, and became a patron of Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2022 she founded NIKA Project Space, opening it in Dubai in March 2023, drawn by the city's cosmopolitan character and entrepreneurial spirit. Now based between Switzerland and Dubai, she has built NIKA around two convictions she states openly: a commitment to conceptual art for its intellectual depth, and a determination to give women — and artists from the Global South — the representation the industry has long withheld. In 2024 she extended that mission to Europe, opening a NIKA space near Paris.

Curators & programme

Curatorial team and exhibition programming.

Nadine Khalil

Nadine Khalil

Curator

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

Curator · since 2003

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.