Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have marks Bady Dalloul’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Curated by Lucas Morin, the exhibition forms the second chapter of Dalloul’s ongoing Land of Dreams series, following its presentation in Tokyo and preceding its next iteration in Lisbon.
The exhibition brings together autobiographical fragments and observed narratives, focusing on ordinary figures navigating political, social, and cultural systems that exceed individual agency. Working across drawing, installation, books, and found materials, Dalloul assembles works that move between the personal and the geopolitical, foregrounding lived experience over abstract commentary.
Central to the exhibition is Age of Empires, a newly produced series of fifty works on paper. Drawing from onmyōdō, a nineteenth-century Japanese astrological system, the series reflects on the endurance and collapse of imperial structures, using symbolism and diagrammatic language to trace cycles of authority, belief, and decline. Elsewhere, Matchboxes presents dozens of miniature drawings housed inside matchboxes, capturing fleeting scenes, media imagery, and political moments accumulated over years, including references to Syria, where the artist’s family originates. These compressed formats mirror the instability and immediacy of the events they register.
The exhibition also includes a reconstructed apartment based on Dalloul’s live-in studio in Dubai. Within this setting, small-scale works produced over the past five years map a nomadic practice shaped by movement between France, Japan, and the UAE. Books, games, magazines, and handmade objects form a dense constellation of references, reflecting how domestic spaces become sites of production, memory, and reflection.
The exhibition title stems from a modest self-portrait made during Dalloul’s time in Tokyo and points to his recurring strategy of approaching identity indirectly. Many works produced in Japan take the form of portraits of people he encountered, addressing questions of migration, representation, and cultural projection, particularly in relation to Arab and South and West Asian identities within Japanese popular culture. This period marked a shift in his practice toward everyday objects and close observation.
Across the exhibition, Dalloul returns to childhood acts of invention -imaginary nations, borders, and histories – as a framework for examining how personal lives are shaped by distant political decisions. His work consistently disrupts linear historical narratives, using humour, fiction, and material improvisation to question how histories are constructed and whose knowledge is sustained.
Location: Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE
Date: 20 September 2025 until 22 February 2026