Dom Art Projects presents, The Matter of Light, a group exhibition, curated by Eugenia Kikodze.

Participating Artists: Vladimir Andreenkov, Blue Soup Group, Kamal Boullata, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Armen Bugayan, Andrey Grositsky, Zaha Hadid, Susan Hefuna, Iced Architects, Ilya Kabakov, Timo Nasseri, Elena Nemkova, Pavel Pepperstein, PPSS Group, Dmitri Prigov, Koka Ramishvili, Eduard Steinberg
David Ter-Oganyan, Boris Turetsky, Oleg Vassiliev, Akram Zaatari, Yuri Zlotnikov.

The Matter of Light takes on both the formal and perceptual aspects of light as it operates within modern and contemporary art. Light is what allows us to perceive the world around us. When we look at our surroundings, what we are seeing are not objects themselves, but rather the light that bounces off of them, communicating to us their contours. The human eye detects a photon, which is then translated by the retina into a signal for the brain. Color and form, then, are entirely dependent on our interaction with light. You could say for this reason that visual art itself can be thought of as a product of light.

But light also has other ways of affecting our perception. Throughout the history of the world, light has been assigned many different kinds of meaning, including the mystical, the metaphysical, and the sacred. Scientific advancements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly discoveries related to microscopic matter and the theory of relativity turned the attention of the spheres of art and culture to the mechanisms of light. Modernism approached the topic from a formal, analytical method. And while throughout the last century artistic guidelines have changed dramatically, veering sharply from the dominance of modernist trends, this emphasis on formal analysis has now been incorporated into the body of contemporary art.

The exhibition brings together a multigenerational group of artists from across Eastern Europe and the Arab world, all bound by a shared interest in metaphysics and its representation within art. Curator Eugenia Kikodze allows for a wide range of responses and approaches to the topic of light, from the rationalist modernism found in works by Eduard Shteynberg, Koka Ramishvili, Susan Hefuna and Kamal Boullata, to the expressionism explored by artists like Zoulikha Bouabdellah, and Yury Zlotnikov, to the ironic conceptualism in artists like David Ter-Oganyan and the Blue Soup Group.

The Matter of Light will run from October to March 2027 in the gallery space of Dom Art Projects.

A curator and art critic based in Italy, Eugenia Kikodze has curated more than thirty exhibitions in Russia and abroad, including Modus R. Russian Formalism Today (together with Olesya Turkina, The Newton Building, Miami, 2006), Urban Formalism (Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), and Saturnalia (Open Society Institute Tbilisi and Batumi, Georgia, 2012). Formerly a professor at the Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and the Rodchenko School, Kikodze has also collaborated as a curator and art director for multiple foundations and private galleries. From 2013 until 2020, she served as the head of the Modern Moscow department at the Museum of Moscow, where, in addition to organizing live events and festivals, she staged large-scale historical surveys such as Moscow Thaw. 1956-1968 and Dreams of Moscow.