Amna AlMemari, Lubnah Ansari, MG, Andrew Riad: Infrared
This group show is the culmination of the second edition of NIKA Project Space’s Open Studio programme: four artists based in the UAE were invited to develop new bodies of work in dialogue with the space, one another, and the public. Curated by Rahel Aima, the exhibition brings together projects developed during the residency themed around the observer effect – “in which a wave becomes a particle and the body becomes a tongue through ritual, accumulation, and the heat of the eye … Rather than producing works in response to a prescribed theme, the participating artists continued investigations proposed during the Open Studio application process. Over the course of the residency, these projects evolved through experimentation, research, conversation, and material exploration, offering a glimpse into artistic practice as an unfolding process”.
Dubai-based Singaporean artist MG has new paintings from her ongoing series Collecting the Collectors, which examines the private interiors of art collectors as psychologically charged spaces where identity and power are negotiated through objects and images. Drawing from real interiors while deliberately disrupting their spatial logic, her paintings transform domestic settings into unstable environments in which artworks, decorative objects, and their owners become participants in an intricate theatre of collecting and self-construction.
Andrew Riad expands his multidisciplinary research into dance, ancient Egyptian mythology, and the material history of copper through an installation combining painting, sculpture, text, and ritual gesture. The project interweaves personal memory, Coptic funerary traditions, and the persistence of language; copper, roses, milk, water, and movement recur throughout the installation and individual objects, connecting ideas of ancestry, spirituality, and cultural survival.
Lubnah Ansari continues the material investigations initiated through recent research; her practice considers the migrations and transformations of the word haq across South and Southwest Asia, approaching language as a material capable of translation and renewal. Working with ash, stone, sand, glass, photography, and found objects, Ansari develops sculptural and photographic works that reflect on memory and the ways meaning persists across histories and geographies.
And Emirati artist Amna AlMemari presents a new chapter in her ongoing exploration of Tarflowers, a fictional ecosystem that draws on the landscapes and visual culture of the Gulf. Combining photography, drawing, and mixed media, her works construct speculative environments where geological, political, and media narratives become layered into new visual ecologies.
To 31 October.
Above: Amna AlMemari, Tarflowers (fragment) (2026)
