The Matter of Light is a group exhibition at Dom Art Projects in Al Quoz 1, Dubai, on view from 27 October 2026 to 10 March 2027. Eugenia Kikodze curates the show. It gathers modern and contemporary works by 22 artists and groups from Eastern Europe and the Arab world. Several works are lent by the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Art Jameel Collection, Window Project and private collectors. Entry is free.

The exhibition treats light as both a formal problem and a question of perception. People see things through the light their surfaces reflect, so the colour and form of a painting are themselves effects of light. The curator also recalls the mystical, metaphysical and sacred meanings given to light over time. She links scientific discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in microscopic matter and relativity, to a new artistic interest in how light works. Modernists met that interest with formal analysis, a method that contemporary art has since absorbed.

Kikodze sorts the responses loosely. Rationalist modernism runs through works by Eduard Steinberg, Koka Ramishvili, Susan Hefuna and Kamal Boullata. Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Yuri Zlotnikov stand for an expressionist line, and the Blue Soup Group and David Ter-Oganyan for an ironic conceptualism. The list also includes Ilya Kabakov, Dmitri Prigov, Pavel Pepperstein, Akram Zaatari, Timo Nasseri and Zaha Hadid. Boullata (1942 to 2019), born in Jerusalem, built silkscreens from Kufic letters and geometry before turning to light and transparency in later paintings.

Kikodze, an Italy-based curator and art critic, has organised more than thirty exhibitions. Her projects include Urban Formalism at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007 and Saturnalia in Tbilisi and Batumi in 2012. From 2013 to 2020 she headed the Modern Moscow department of the Museum of Moscow, where she staged the survey Moscow Thaw. 1956-1968. She has also taught at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow State University and the Rodchenko School.