Hybrid Vistas Reimagines the Landscape for a Digital Age at NIKA Project Space

Dubai has never shied away from bold ideas, but this winter the city hosts a show that feels less like an exhibition and more like a deeper inquiry into how we see the world. Hybrid Vistas, opening at NIKA Project Space, gathers five international artists to rethink the landscape in a time when almost everything is filtered through a screen before it reaches the eye.

Rather than presenting nature as something serene or familiar, the exhibition positions it as something unsettled, coded and constantly reconstructed. The landscape becomes a shifting vision shaped by memory, machine influence and the strange distortions of digital culture. The result is a collection of works that confront what nature means when it is no longer simply observed but mediated, fragmented and rebuilt.

The show opens with the striking work of Melissa Ríos, whose monumental painting sets the tone for what follows. Her canvases unfold like dream sequences, rich with layered images where recognisable forms collide with surreal figures and abstract gestures. Her worlds are emotional and introspective, quietly suggesting that the boundary between what is seen and what is felt is far more porous than we admit.

Iranian artist Ali Kaeini approaches ideas of displacement and history through a visual language shaped by architecture and the colour sensibility of Iranian culture. His works expand the idea of collage, not by bringing cut fragments together but by transforming the entire canvas into a terrain of geometric patterns and spiralling forms. His landscapes feel both ancient and freshly imagined, an echo of a place that never stays still.

Katya Muromtseva shifts the tone with paintings from her project No Such Thing As Day and Night. Her abstract language, built from black forms and unstable chromatic shifts, refuses to settle into recognisable images. These works reflect a world overloaded with noise, conflict and fractured communication. What remains is something urgent and stripped back, a presence rather than a depiction.

Daniele Genadry moves even further from the literal. She paints light itself, or more accurately, the fleeting sensation of light as it slips from comprehension. Her scenes hover between clarity and disappearance, refusing the logic of digital images that demand sharpness and certainty. In her hands, the landscape becomes an atmospheric event, holding viewers in a moment where vision is both offered and denied.

Adel Abidin grounds the exhibition in a sense of memory and loss. His work recalls Iraq, not through direct representation but through impressions of sea, horizon and the emotional weight of place. These imagined terrains feel haunted by movement and migration. Beauty and desolation sit side by side, conjuring a world altered by upheaval yet still tethered to human experience.

Together, the artists in Hybrid Vistas show that landscape painting is not a relic of tradition but a powerful site of experimentation. Nature, in their hands, becomes a construction shaped by technology, global uncertainty and personal memory. The exhibition asks visitors to look again at the world around them and question how much of what they see is raw experience and how much has been refracted through the many lenses of modern life.

Hybrid Vistas runs from twenty six November two thousand twenty five to seven February two thousand twenty six at NIKA Project Space in Dubai.