The Gaze

AKKA Project presents The Gaze for the 2025 summer season — a group exhibition that continues the gallery’s ongoing inquiry into perception and the many ways we experience the act of looking.

This chapter of the exploration focuses on the female portrait, approached not as a static genre, but as a dynamic, intimate, and ever-evolving terrain. Far from offering a singular vision, the exhibition reveals a spectrum of perspectives that challenge, expand, and enrich our understanding of how women are seen—and how they see themselves.

Each work on display captures a unique gaze: that of the subject, layered with the distinct viewpoint of the artist. These dual perspectives, shaped by varied cultural roots, personal histories, and aesthetic choices, form a complex visual dialogue. The result is a textured collection of portraits, where difference itself becomes the common thread.

Spanning painting, photography, and digital media, the selected works resist easy categorization. Vivid compositions blend memory and identity, bold brushwork channels inner strength, and reimagined photographic forms dissolve the boundaries between realism and abstraction. Some portraits speak with quiet intimacy, others with striking immediacy—but all invite the viewer to look deeper.

The Gaze is more than an exhibition—it is an invitation to consider the politics of looking. It asks us to pause and reflect on how identity is framed, how presence is captured, and how every gaze—offered or returned—reveals more than what first meets the eye.