Biography
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.