Joy, Aid, Heat: Coded Gestures at NIKA Project Space

By Daniel H. Rey

Published on July 14th, 2023

Dubai embraces its unapologetic summer and, with rough temperatures, what remains tender? As we further retreat into indoors monotony, what is the last “something” that can smile at us, or save us?

Running from May to July, Coded Gestures is the second exhibition at the newly opened NIKA Project Space in Dubai’s Al Quoz. Curated by Nadine Khalil, the exhibition features the works of five artists practicing from West to East Asia.

1. (Left) Installation view of Frozen series, 2023 by Minja Gu. Black and white photographic prints, 110cm x 165cm each. (Right) Minja Gu. House Tea de la Maison de la Casa, 2019-2023. Performance and documentation. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

Khalil states that “throughout the exhibition, a comment is being made on non-productive forms of labor in repetitive vocabularies that can be seen as either emancipatory or oppressive in our output-driven, capitalist era.” The very labor at the heart of Coded Gestures may seem non-productive, but it is also athletic labor, nutritional labor, displaced labor, migratory labor, literary labor. When we problematize our very ability to work, how do we portray joy? How do we cry for help? Coded Gestures is not about the artworks for what they say, but for what they intend on and point at, for the joys they trigger and the help they demand.

Throughout the exhibition, a comment is being made on non-productive forms of labor in repetitive vocabularies that can be seen as either emancipatory or oppressive in our output-driven, capitalist era.

- Nadine Khalil

In digesting the exhibition, I go back to a quote by artist André Butzer who believed that paintings are “localizations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope, which is why they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of.” With this, I also think of videos, AI-generated imagery, sculpture and performance—any medium really—as localizations of despair and hope. The binary of emancipation and oppression that Khalil discussed may well be translated into the joy and aid portrayed in the exhibition. In this spirit, the works in Coded Gestures edge us a few inches closer to the joy and aid we may well lack as mercury hits 50 ºC.

With close attention to language, we witness constant instances of “repetition” of actions and “classifications” of everyday life items. In its two floors, connected by a steep flight of stairs, the exhibition investigates and exposes the subtle ways in which artists insert their routines, preoccupations, and the slight absurdities surrounding them into greater systems and operations: food supplies and meal deliveries, construction materials, migration and cultural erasure, artificial intelligence and, why not, the Olympics.

When we problematize our very ability to work, how do we portray joy? How do we cry for help?

2. Installation view of Coded Gestures, curated by Nadine Khalil at NIKA Project Space. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

The exhibition is initially framed by quoting Dubai-based artist Khalid, who has peppered a sentence on three delivery notes of meals eaten days before the opening:

“There is
a part of me
that wants to hide”

Breaking down this statement embodying the show, Coded Gestures engages with those “parts” in the artists’ lives, “parts” that are humanized or have agency, “parts” that seek concealment.

3. Khalid. Receipts II, 2023. Receipts, receipt holders, comment section. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

By the wall, Khalid presents a durational piece sharing an extension of his long journey photographing the sunset. For this, he feeds his installation with a photograph of the sunset every day of the exhibition, which gets printed on the spot and hung with the aid of gallery staff. Khalid transforms the daily occurrence of dusk into a preserved, cataloged and delegated archive. The delegation of tasks is a soft introduction into the wider, and not minor, theme of labor in the exhibition.

Khalid transforms the daily occurrence of dusk into a preserved, cataloged and delegated archive.

4. Khalid. My job is to look at the sunset, 2023. iPhone, printer, letter, sunset, variable dimensions. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

On a tight corner across the room, Alexander Ugay unpacks a chilling story of his parents navigating labor, migration and erasure as Kazakhstan-based workers of Korean descent. Ugay, one of the artists in the show represented by the gallery, now lives in South Korea and has begun unraveling the productive forces that once “justified” and also shaped his family's displacement forever. With a participation spanning video work, photo collage and mini sculptures with text, what first calls my attention is the work generated with the help of AI. Building on images of his mother and aunt as children in Soviet Central Asia, Ugay “delegates” the task to generate images of Kazakh girls doing X, Y, Z to a software. The generated image depicts women of Slavic complexion, a visual which is then transformed, presumably to his comfort, when the artist opens the AI prompt with the opening word “Korean”. Not far from here, a video shot in South Korea mimics factory line actions completed outdoors, and without tools. The different individuals depicted are former factory workers showing the productive bodily movements they have made for years and the epitome of what anglophones call “muscle memory”. In these gestures, Ugay dissects the past by visualizing it through a language learning model, or by modeling how others have learned the language of neo-capitalist productive labor. When the body has been misrepresented or exploited, who is there to give it rest?

When the body has been misrepresented or exploited, who is there to give it rest?

5. Alexander Ugay. Unknown Return, 2023. Mixed media installation, encaustic wax, digital prints, variable dimensions. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

The lobby also greets us with thin flower-patterned fabrics on the floor. These lead us to encounter Minja Gu’s House Tea de la Maison de la Casa (2019-2023), a careful arrangement of tea ware, herbs and flowers surveying the multiple ingredients one can have tea with. For the rest of the show, tea is not presented in its liquid form, but rather, inventoried, exposed, aired and audience-photographed, consumed but not ingested. It is a proponent, it seems, of essential forms of social gathering around the mundane, the ritualistic and the convivial.

In another of her works, 42.195 (2006), Gu shares visual documentation of a full marathon she completed in over two days. Unapologetic about her exhaustion, the seemingly nightmarish run stands as a lesson on perseverance and its positives. Her gesture complicates how humans see limitations, resilience, and even hope.

Also dissecting the physicality of labor, Mona Ayyash’s installation Trampoline (2015) requires the audience to take two steps up a platform to observe a gymnast almost doing a flip during Olympic games. The curator offers us a birdseye view that maximizes this athletic feat and ridicules the flip by preventing us from actually witnessing it. This I recall as the most physical of interactions present in the exhibition. Here, anticipation, frustration and curiosity coexist.

6. Mona Ayyash. Trampoline, 2015. Single-channel digital video on plinth, 32’. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

Fatma Al Ali’s 3D garden-like piece titled My Mother Told Me Not to Collect Bricks (2020-23) speaks to the unseen joy of pursuing the once forbidden, while the irregular shapes of her gypsum blocks aiming for stability speak to a system of randomness, controlled chaos and, even, chicanery.

7. Fatma Al Ali. My Mother Told Me Not To Collect Bricks, 2020-2023. Gypsum bricks, latex bricks. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

Upstairs, floating from the warehouse’s ceiling, the multi-channel video installation She’ll be apples (2013) by Ayyash discloses multiple attempts of establishing a relationship with this fruit. The video’s choreography speaks to a process of representation through self, object, and object as self. Also in this fruity arena, Minja Gu presents a tree of hanging banana peels, a collage-type classification of potato peels, and, downstairs, a selection of ice sculptures of fruits.

8. Mona Ayyash. She’ll be apples, 2013. Three-channel digital video, 36’ 59’’. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

The gallery’s office plays home to Khalid’s work During work hours (2022), which exposes and ridicules how we treat time, productivity and the parallel lives that counterbalance business hours. With this work, the curator consolidates a core value of the exhibition: that the artistic gestures of coding and concealing are ways of advocating for newer and freer forms of interpreting productivity. With a gallery turned into a laboratory of gestures, one gets to question virtually anything. I may have confused the air conditioner’s control pad next to the wall text to be an artwork about… the weather.

But it is precisely in this unsurmountable heat that one gets to digest a multi-course exhibition in a gallery whose bold and critical push is also finding its teenage DNA. NIKA is hoping to center the Middle East, women in the arts, and their counterparts, and possibly, I add, speak to a larger and more interconnected notion of Asia. All of this with voices that, even if newcomers to a sometimes hermetic scene, blow a wave of fresh air to a sometimes breathless environment.

For months to come, may we continue being touched by gestures so subtle that they trigger joy, aid our needs, and even cool down our temperature. The art world may well be code-dependent, given its multiplicity of gestures; and co-dependent, given its absolute reliance on economically productive apparatuses.

The artistic gestures of coding and concealing are ways of advocating for newer and freer forms of interpreting productivity.

9. Minja Gu. Banana tree, 2018 - 2020. Dried banana peels on wooden structure, 190cm x 120cm x 120 cm. Courtesy of NIKA Project Space. Photography by Ismail Noor | Seeing Things

Daniel H. Rey researches, programs and curates between soils and Wi-Fis. His work is concerned with communities in the “Global South”: how they cross-pollinate, communicate, host, and experience hostility. Today, Daniel coordinates public programs at Art Jameel, where he is also active in youth-driven learning. In parallel, he has launched Almacén المخزن Armazém, a multimedia research project archiving and exhibiting creative practices tied to Latin America and the Arab world. Daniel feels at home in Asunción, Oslo, Dubai, and possibly Mars.

Daniel is former managing editor of Global Art Daily and a returnee contributing writer.
_Instagram

Nadine Khalil is an independent art critic, editor and researcher, curator. She is currently researching the body as an expanded site of performance and labor in the Gulf and Mediterranean region. After a decade-long stint in art publishing, she advises art institutions such as the Ishara Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut and the NYUAD Arts Center on editorial strategy, content development and publications. She is the former editor of Dubai-based contemporary art magazine, Canvas (2017-2020) and the Beirut-based magazines A mag and Bespoke (2010-2016). Her writing can be found in Art Agenda, Art Forum, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Review Asia, Artsy, Broadcast, Brooklyn Rail, FT Arts, Frieze, Ocula and the Women’s Review of Books.
_Instagram

NIKA Project Space offers the possibility of representation through art exhibitions and other initiatives for both emerging and increasingly established artists from the Middle East and internationally. The space provides a critically engaged program that emphasizes contemporaneity and cross-cultural dialogue in art creation with a focus on conceptualization, abstraction, and philosophical inquiry with a strong focus on the works by female artists. NIKA Project Space aims to break down barriers and forge dialogue across cultures through contemporary art by artists working in a range of artistic mediums, including performance, painting, photography, sculpture, installation and the digital realm. _Instagram

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Joy, Aid, Heat: Coded Gestures at NIKA Project Space

Throughout the exhibition, a comment is being made on non-productive forms of labor in repetitive vocabularies that can be seen as either emancipatory or oppressive in our output-driven, capitalist era.

When we problematize our very ability to work, how do we portray joy? How do we cry for help?

Khalid transforms the daily occurrence of dusk into a preserved, cataloged and delegated archive.

When the body has been misrepresented or exploited, who is there to give it rest?

The artistic gestures of coding and concealing are ways of advocating for newer and freer forms of interpreting productivity.

︎︎︎Previous Next︎

E-Issue 07 –– AUHWinter 2023-24

E-07++ Winter/Spring 2024

About ––

Interviews ––

Open Call ––

Newsletter ––

Chronological Archive ––

E-Issue 01 –– AUH/DXB Summer 2020

E-01++ Fall/Winter 2020-21

🎙️GAD Talk Series –– Season 1 2020

E-Issue 02 –– NYC Spring 2021

E-02++ Spring/Summer 2021

E-Issue 03 ––TYO Fall 2021

E-03++ Fall/Winter 2021-22

E-Issue 04 –– IST Spring 2022

E-04++ Spring/Summer 2022

E-Issue 05 –– VCE Fall 2022

E-05++ Fall/Winter 2022-23

E-Issue 06 –– DXB/SHJSpring 2023

🔍 Legal

Joy, Aid, Heat: Coded Gestures at NIKA Project Space

Throughout the exhibition, a comment is being made on non-productive forms of labor in repetitive vocabularies that can be seen as either emancipatory or oppressive in our output-driven, capitalist era.

When we problematize our very ability to work, how do we portray joy? How do we cry for help?

Khalid transforms the daily occurrence of dusk into a preserved, cataloged and delegated archive.

When the body has been misrepresented or exploited, who is there to give it rest?

The artistic gestures of coding and concealing are ways of advocating for newer and freer forms of interpreting productivity.

︎︎︎Previous Next︎

E-Issue 07 –– AUH
Winter 2023-24

E-07++
Winter/Spring 2024

E-Issue 01 –– AUH/DXB
Summer 2020

E-01++
Fall/Winter 2020-21

E-Issue 02 –– NYC
Spring 2021

E-02++
Spring/Summer 2021

E-Issue 03 ––TYO
Fall 2021

E-03++
Fall/Winter 2021-22

E-Issue 04 –– IST
Spring 2022

E-04++
Spring/Summer 2022

E-Issue 05 –– VCE
Fall 2022

E-05++
Fall/Winter 2022-23

E-Issue 06 –– DXB/SHJ
Spring 2023