“The Matter of Light” at Dom Art Projects, Dubai: Kabakov, Hadid, Boullata and a Century of Looking at Light

Light is the one material every artist uses and almost none can hold. “The Matter of Light,” opening at Dom Art Projects in Dubai on 27 October 2026 and running until 10 March 2027, takes that paradox as its subject. Curated by Eugenia Kikodze, the exhibition gathers 22 artists and collectives from Eastern Europe and the Arab world — a pairing that is rarely made, and that turns out to be revealing.

The idea behind The Matter of Light

According to Dom Art Projects, the exhibition examines light on two levels. The first is formal and perceptual: how artists have used light to structure space, colour and form. The second is older and deeper — light’s mystical, metaphysical and sacred meanings. The curatorial text traces how the scientific discoveries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pushed modernist artists toward an analytical approach to light, while many never lost interest in its spiritual charge. What unites the participants, across several generations, is a shared concern with metaphysics. Founder and chief curator of Dom Art Projects Alisa Bagdonaite summed it up in the press release: the show “explores how light has shaped the way we see.”

Three ways of seeing

Kikodze groups the artists’ approaches into broad families, and they make a useful map for visitors.

• Rationalist modernism — Eduard Steinberg, Koka Ramishvili, Susan Hefuna and Kamal Boullata. Steinberg was a central figure of Soviet nonconformist geometric abstraction; Boullata, the Palestinian artist and writer, built luminous geometric compositions out of Arabic letters and Islamic architectural forms; Hefuna is known for works drawing on the latticed mashrabiya screen, which literally filters light.
• Expressionism — Zoulikha Bouabdellah and Yuri Zlotnikov, where light is energy and gesture rather than system.
• Ironic conceptualism — David Ter-Oganyan and Blue Soup Group, artists who treat the sublime with a raised eyebrow.

Around them gather some of the most important names of late Soviet and post-Soviet art — Ilya Kabakov, Dmitri Prigov, Pavel Pepperstein, Oleg Vassiliev — alongside Akram Zaatari, Timo Nasseri, Zaha Hadid and others. Hadid’s presence is a reminder that the architect’s early paintings were steeped in the Russian avant-garde, particularly Malevich’s Suprematism, a movement itself obsessed with infinite white space and cosmic light.

Why Eastern Europe and the Arab world?

It might seem an unusual meeting, but both regions developed modernisms in tension with official culture and with Western European models, and both have deep traditions in which light carries religious meaning — the icon’s gold ground in Orthodox Christianity, the geometry of light and shade in Islamic architecture. The exhibition’s loans from the Art Jameel Collection and the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation, two of the most important collections of modern Arab art in the Gulf, give the Arab side real historical weight.

Who is Dom Art Projects?

Dom Art Projects describes itself as an independent art institution in Dubai, founded by Alisa Bagdonaite (founder and chief curator) and Anna Pumpyanskaya (co-founder and director), with a commercial arm, Dom Art Gallery. “The Matter of Light” is its third not-for-profit exhibition, and admission is free. Curator Eugenia Kikodze, now based in Italy, is a critic and curator who has organised more than thirty exhibitions and led the Modern Moscow department at the Museum of Moscow from 2013 to 2020. The project sits in Al Quoz, the industrial district that has become the heart of Dubai’s gallery scene around Alserkal Avenue.

Why it matters for collectors and artists

For collectors, the show is a rare chance to see Moscow Conceptualism and modern Arab abstraction in dialogue in the Gulf — two fields whose markets are usually separate. For painters and designers, it is a long lesson in light as a compositional tool: as structure, as gesture and as idea. With a run of more than four months, it is also one of the longest-running gallery exhibitions of Dubai’s winter season, overlapping with the city’s busy art calendar in early 2027.

Visiting information

Dom Art Projects, Al Quoz 1, Dubai. The contact page lists Warehouse 40, Al Khayat Avenue; please confirm the exact warehouse with the gallery, as its map link points elsewhere. 27 October 2026 – 10 March 2027, Tuesday–Sunday 11:00–20:00, closed Mondays; free admission. Phone +971 4 585 8149, email [email protected]. Read the official exhibition page, our Matter of Light listing, and browse Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.