Dom Art Projects Explores Light Across the Arab World and Eastern Europe in 'The Matter of Light'

Dubai is about to get a thoughtful new exhibition. Dom Art Projects, an independent art institution in Al Quoz, has just announced The Matter of Light, a group show that looks at how light has shaped the way we see, opening on 27 October 2026. Excitingly, it brings together artists from across the Arab world and Eastern Europe, including some very big names from our region.

For anyone less familiar with it, Dom Art Projects was founded in 2025 by Alisa Bagdonaite and Anna Pumpyanskaya, and it presents museum-grade exhibitions in its space on Al Khayat Avenue, alongside children's and public programmes, artist talks and educational initiatives. The Matter of Light is its third not-for-profit exhibition. It was recently joined by Dom Art Gallery, a new commercial arm.

Curated by Eugenia Kikodze, a curator and art critic based in Italy who has organised more than 30 exhibitions in Russia and abroad, the show explores the formal and perceptual sides of light through a wide range of approaches, from rationalist modernism and expressionism to ironic conceptualism. As the exhibition text reminds us, we never actually see objects themselves, only the light reflected from them, so in a sense all visual art is a product of light. Throughout history, light has also been given mystical, metaphysical and sacred meanings, while scientific discoveries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pushed artists to think about how it works.

The list of artists is impressive and spans several generations. From our region and its diaspora, there is Beirut-based Akram Zaatari (b. 1966), whose An extraordinary event (2018), a series of eight inkjet photographs, comes from the Art Jameel Collection, as well as the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, Susan Hefuna, Berlin-based Timo Nasseri (b. 1972) and Zoulikha Bouabdellah (b. 1977), who lives between Casablanca and Paris. Bouabdellah's Two Lovers (2010), made from two glowing LEDs, is a highlight. Interestingly, there is also a Tea and Coffee Set (1995 to 1996) by the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, a reminder of how her sculptural vision extended to the smallest objects.

They are joined by leading figures from Eastern Europe, including Ilya Kabakov, Eduard Steinberg, Dmitri Prigov, Oleg Vassiliev, Vladimir Andreenkov, Yuri Zlotnikov, Pavel Pepperstein and Koka Ramishvili, as well as Armen Bugayan, Andrey Grositsky, Boris Turetsky, David Ter-Oganyan, Elena Nemkova, Blue Soup Group, Iced Architects and PPSS Group. Encouragingly, the exhibition includes loans from Sharjah's Barjeel Art Foundation and the Art Jameel Collection, two of the most important collections of art from our region.

Speaking about the show, Anna Pumpyanskaya, Co-Founder of Dom Art Projects, said: "The Matter of Light is the third not-for-profit exhibition we have presented at Dom Art Projects, reflecting our commitment to bringing ambitious, museum-quality exhibitions to Dubai and creating opportunities for audiences to encounter artists and practices they may not have encountered before. We are particularly grateful to Art Jameel Collection and Barjeel Art Foundation for their generous loans, which add important perspectives to the exhibition and allow us to build a richer dialogue across generations and geographies."

What's more, the exhibition opens alongside a solo show at Dom Art Gallery by Kirill Makarov (b. 1988). Titled Unveiled: Painting in the Age of Post-Produced Reality, it reconstructs war environments from fragments of media imagery, treating photographs and frames taken from videos the artist found online as spatial coordinates, so that scenes can be rebuilt as three-dimensional settings. Working across figurative painting and digital media, Makarov combines traditional painting with ultraviolet printing, augmented reality and video games, and his work was recently shown by the gallery at the Tokyo Gendai art fair.

According to Alisa Bagdonaite, Founder and Chief Curator at Dom Art Projects, the two shows are in conversation. "The Matter of Light explores how light has shaped the way we see across different historical moments and geographies," she said. "In dialogue with Kirill Makarov's exhibition, it opens onto a distinctly contemporary question: how is our visual reality changing as culture becomes increasingly post-digital?"

So, what can we take away from this? It is rare to see modern and contemporary artists from the Arab world shown side by side with the Soviet and post-Soviet avant-garde, and this pairing promises some fascinating conversations about perception, faith and abstraction. With Dubai's art scene growing at a rapid pace, it is encouraging to see a young, independent space putting on such an ambitious, museum-quality show. We can't wait to see it.

The Matter of Light and Unveiled: Painting in the Age of Post-Produced Reality are on view at Dom Art Projects, Al Khayat Avenue, Al Quoz, Dubai, from 27 October 2026 to 10 March 2027. The opening takes place on 27 October at 6pm.

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