Dubai: Dom Art Projects, an independent art institution based in Dubai, presents its third not-for-profit exhibition, The Matter of Light. Curated by Eugenia Kikodze, the exhibition explores the formal and perceptual aspects of light through a wide range of approaches, from rationalist modernism and expressionism to ironic conceptualism. 

The exhibition, which will run from 27 October 2026 through 10 March 2027, brings together a multigenerational group of artists from across the Arab world and Eastern Europe, including Akram Zaatari, Andrey Grositsky, Armen Bugayan, Blue Soup Group, Boris Turetsky, David Ter-Oganyan, Dmitri Prigov, Eduard Steinberg, Elena Nemkova, Iced Architects, Ilya Kabakov, Kamal Boullata, Koka Ramishvili, Oleg Vassiliev, Pavel  Pepperstein, PPSS Group, Susan Hefuna, Timo Nasseri, Vladimir Andreenkov, Yuri Zlotnikov, Zaha Hadid, and Zoulikha Bouabdellah. The exhibition includes loans from Art Jameel Collection and Barjeel Art Foundation. 

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.”

Alisa Bagdonaite, Founder and Chief Curator at Dom Art Projects, said ““The Matter of Light explores how light has shaped the way we see across different historical moments and geographies. 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? Makarov’s practice engages precisely with this shift, examining how images are perceived and how artistic narratives can be constructed today.”

Light is what allows us to perceive the world around us. When we look at our surroundings, we do not see objects themselves, but the light reflected from them, which allows us to perceive their contours. The human eye detects photons, which are translated by the retina into signals that are transmitted to the brain. Color and form, then, are entirely dependent on our interaction with light. In this sense, visual art itself can be understood as a product of light. 

But light also affects perception in other ways. Throughout history, light has been assigned many different kinds of meaning, including the mystical, the metaphysical, and the sacred. Scientific advances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—particularly discoveries related to the nature of matter and the theory of relativity— drew attention in art and culture to the mechanisms of light. Modernism approached the subject through formal analysis. Although guidelines to art changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, moving away from the dominance of modernist tendencies, this emphasis on formal analysis was absorbed into contemporary art.

Opening alongside this exhibition on 27 October 2026, Dom Art Gallery, the commercial arm of Dom Art Projects, will present a solo exhibition by Kirill Makarov (b.1988). Unveiled: Painting in the Age of Post-Produced Reality responds to the mediated nature of contemporary reality by reconstructing war environments from fragments of media imagery circulating in a post-analogue world. Photographs and individual frames extracted from videos the artist found online are treated as spatial coordinates, allowing scenes to be reassembled as three-dimensional settings, with varying degrees of precision depending on the quality and quantity of the source material.  

Working across figurative painting and digital media, Makarov explores the relationship between virtual and physical environments through immersive compositions that combine traditional painting with ultraviolet printing, augmented reality, and video games. His works were recently exhibited by Dom Art Gallery at the Tokyo Gendai art fair.

The Matter of Light
27 October 2026 - 10 March 2027
Dom Art Projects
Al Khayat Avenue, Dubai

Kirill Makarov
Unveiled: Painting in the Age of Post-Produced Reality
27 October 2026 - 10 March 2027
Dom Art Projects
Al Khayat Avenue, Dubai