EXCLUSIVE: Dubai’s Elie Khouri Art Foundation Taps Counterspace for Permanent Home

Media executive and businessman Elie Khouri began building his art collection with the aim of representing artists across ages, genders and races. Now, he is moving forward with establishing a permanent home for the Elie Khouri Art Foundation, which is built on a small collection of its own.

Known as EKAF, the foundation will be housed in a repurposed villa in Dubai’s seafront Jumeirah 1 neighborhood, with a program spanning contemporary art exhibitions, education and public engagement.

“My foundation will be a home for contemporary art, open to everyone. A place to inspire, challenge and spark dialogue. Above all, I want to give something lasting back to Dubai and the wider UAE, a country that has given me so much, by helping build a cultural legacy for generations to come,” Khouri said in a statement.

The project is expected to be completed in late 2028 and has been entrusted to Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based architecture practice founded and led by Sumayya Vally. A Time100 Next honoree, Vally rose to prominence as the youngest architect commissioned to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2021.

Vally’s vision builds on the region’s distinct contemporary architectural language, which continues to rapidly evolve alongside its population and cultural fabric.

“I am interested in what happens when we take these intimate geometries and give them a new public scale: when the architecture of a room becomes the architecture of a city-facing facade, and the memory of a house becomes the beginnings of an institution,” she said.

Khouri’s personal collection started with one painting, “So Happy to See You,” a 2002 work by Lebanese American artist Nabil Nahas and features works from over 300 artists spanning Latin America, Africa and Europe. In 2019, Khouri signaled his commitment to establishing a foundation by completing a weeklong collector-in-residence program at London’s Delfina Foundation. He stepped away from his day-to-day business to research and develop a blueprint for EKAF and consider future public museum concepts. The intention is to build up the foundations collection over time. Temporary exhibitions will be based on Khouri’s private collection with plans to draw on loans from other private collections, institutions, as well as collaborations with artists.

In January 2026, the foundation appointed Caroline Louca as director. An art consultant, Louca began her career as a corporate lawyer in Paris and Cairo. She moved to the UAE in 2008 and joined the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, where she played a role in establishing the Louvre, Guggenheim and Zayed National museums. She later joined Christie’s Middle East team in Dubai.

Khouri’s career has also grown alongside the region’s development in the 21st century. Born in Beirut in 1964, he is the French Lebanese former chief executive officer and current chairman of Omnicom Media in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2017, he founded Vivium, a Dubai-based investment and development group with interests in real estate, hospitality and design. Its ventures include boutique hospitality brand Luura; design group Atelio, which spans furniture, art and collectible design, and a luxury real estate partnership with Sotheby’s International Realty. Vivium has helped European and American luxury design brands like Cassina, Giorgetti, Kettal, Rimadesio, Ralph Lauren Home and Boffi|De Padova expand throughout the region.

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