Unverified listing
This gallery profile was created by Exhibo from public information. It is not managed by the organisation yet — details may be incomplete or outdated.
XVA Gallery
Artists, curatorial team, advisors, and partners connected to XVA Gallery.
Artists
Represented and guest artists exhibiting with the gallery.
Jane Beveridge
Jane Bailey Beveridge was born in Edinburgh in 1976 and grew up in Hong Kong. She studied Graphic Design and Fine Art at the University of Brighton, graduated in 1998, and arrived in Dubai in 2002. She joined the art department at Dubai College that same year and has been Head of Art there since 2007. That is twenty-four years of teaching other people to look at things. It has also been twenty-four years of looking herself — at swimming pools and their ordered mosaics, at construction sites, at the dusty haberdasheries on corners that have been there since she arrived, packed from floor to ceiling with thread, fabric, tools and brightly coloured domestic objects. These are among her most cherished places in Dubai. Not the malls. Not the towers. The places that have been overlooked in a city best known for its extravagance. Her practice builds from what she collects: corrugated cardboard, concrete, sand, rust, tangled wires, weathered wood. Mixed-media assemblages that combine painting with mosaic, textiles and found objects. She calls them "five-letter-word adverts" — a reference to her years-long collection of five-letter words whose meaning she finds emotionally precise: TRUST, TRUTH, VOICE, GRACE, ALIVE, TOUCH. DUBAI is five letters. So is LOCAL. The repetitive act of gluing, stitching and knotting is deliberate — meditative, she says, a quiet form of devotion. LOCAL at XVA Gallery in 2026 was her first solo show.
Charlie Koolhaas
Charlie Koolhaas studied sociology in New York and media art at Goldsmiths College in London. She has lived and worked in London, Dubai, Guangzhou, Lagos, Houston and Rotterdam. In each city she stayed long enough to understand what it was actually made of — not the skyline but the tiles, the facades, the corner shops, the surfaces that accumulate time and don't get photographed because they're not spectacular enough. She has been documenting Dubai since 2005. Her book City Lust (2020) brought together twenty years of photographic and written work across five cities — London, Guangzhou, Lagos, Dubai, Houston — exploring the apotheosis of globalisation and the creativity that persists inside it. Domus called her images "clues in a human landscape and a multiculturalism that is more complex and deep-rooted than what the western eye is willing to concede." The photographs became sculptures. The sculptures became garments. Through her Foto-Couture series, she translates images of urban architecture into clothing and printed textiles — making the archive mobile, turning buildings soft, giving memory something to wear. Her work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Vitra Design Museum, Alserkal Avenue and institutions across Europe and Asia. She is based in Rotterdam. She keeps returning to Dubai.
Partners
Institutional partners, collaborators, and allied organisations.
