Coded Gestures

The second exhibition on view at NIKA Project Space brings together conceptual artists from non-Western regions, probing the correlation between post-Soviet and hyper-capitalist societies through key themes of alienation, artistic labor and repetitive gestures. On view: May 5–July 16, 2023.

NIKA Project Space, Dubai’s new art and culture platform, presents its second exhibition Coded Gestures on view through July 16, 2023. Curated by art critic and researcher Nadine Khalil, the exhibition follows the gallery’s mission of supporting cross-cultural dialogues, pairing artists from Central and East Asia with local UAE-based artists. The works, ranging from sculpture to video and photography, function as apparatuses for understanding the context of gestures hidden behind individual processes and collective structures. Rooted in society’s shared experiences, the exhibition gives voice to artists from non-Western regions, finding a common language across seemingly divergent backgrounds and traditions shaped by multinational local contexts.

The new 250 square meter industrial space designed by T.ZED Architects, presents the works of five conceptual artists: Alexander Ugay based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Minja Gu based in Seoul, South Korea, along with UAE-based artists Fatma Al Ali, Mona Ayyash and Khalid.

These contemporary artists translate the creative gesture into a means of invisible labor, exploring it as a source of repetitive vocabularies, ultimately becoming a compelling way to look at the disciplining of bodies and forms. Distilling the idea of labor from a broader social lens to an artistic one, with its varied manifestations of alienation, the exhibition connects the idea of psychological absence with the presence and absence of the body in performance, ultimately questioning the core notion of labor itself.

The exhibition was opened with a live performance of Minja Gu’s House Tea de la Maison de la Casa, 2023, a tea ceremony in which the artist invites all viewers to hundreds of tea infusions, invoking the role of participatory exchange.

From memorized movements of Korean labor migrants in post-Soviet states seen in the video More than a Hundred Thousand Times (2019–20) to AI-generated imagery indexing major historical events affecting the Korean diaspora (Unknown Return, 2023), Alexander Ugay tackles social alienation through imaginaries and archives. His works are fittingly positioned near Fatma Al Ali’s meticulously stacked bricks, My mother told me not to collect bricks (2020), which upon closer look, reveal disparities and the embedded relationship between individual and collective systems.

“The artists in this exhibition bear witness to their changing societies, captured through daily movements. They use visual and algorithmic languages to index invisible histories, from the 1937 Korean deportation to Central Asia to a sports event that never happened,” says curator Nadine Khalil. “As we looked deeper into the works proposed by Alexander and Minja, we found that an interesting thread emerges between post-Soviet and hypercapitalist societies, linking them in terms of consumerism, excess and residual forms,” Khalil continues.

Specifically commissioned for the show, Khalid’s piece, my job is to look at the sunset, 2023, is an incessant documentation of daily sunsets printed in real time and mounted in the gallery throughout the 74 days while the exhibition is open, documenting the artist’s habitual practice. In a similar vein, two other takes on repetition are presented with Minja Gu’s eleven-hour documentation of her version of a marathon done in two days in 42.195 (2006) and Mona Ayyash’s pixelated video, Trampoline (2015) featuring athletes preparing for their jumps, over and over again. Following the gallery’s focus on showing lesser known female artists, founder Veronika Berezina explains further: “These are the kinds of conversations I was interested in bringing to light when I opened NIKA Project Space, especially with women artists who should be more widely recognized.”

Following the thread of conceptually driven art, NIKA becomes a space for a daring, boundarypushing approach that carves a new path for experimental art forms in Dubai.