From 20 September 2025 to 22 February 2026, Dubai’s Jameel Arts Centre hosts Bady Dalloul’s first solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates. Titled Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have, the show offers an autobiographical and symbolic journey blending true and imagined stories, lived experiences and fictional narratives built around objects, places, and memories. Born in Paris in 1986 to Syrian parents, Dalloul has developed a multidisciplinary practice combining drawing, collage, text, and installation to examine the intersections of imagination, political identity, and representation. The title derives from a drawing made in Tokyo, where the artist depicted himself alongside a cat that doesn’t exist - an ironic and vulnerable gesture that becomes the lens through which the exhibition unfolds. Dalloul often inserts himself into his works indirectly, portraying figures who mirror or echo his biography. What emerges is a fragmented and open-ended self-portrait, inviting viewers to reconsider the act of remembering as a creative process. Specifically designed for Gallery 10 at the Jameel, the exhibition features a selection of works from the past five years. Among them is Age of Empires, a series of fifty drawings inspired by a Japanese manual of astrology, repurposed to explore imperial symbols and shifting power dynamics. The Matchboxes series contains miniature drawings framed inside matchboxes, encapsulating political events, domestic scenes, and intimate moments tied to his family’s life in Syria. A site-specific installation recreates the artist’s studio, with scattered notes, personal items, and furniture referencing his mobile creative life between Paris, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi. Dalloul graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2015. As a child, he invented fictional nations with their own flags, borders, and languages - an imaginative game that later evolved into a critical tool for exploring how identities and geopolitical narratives are constructed. His work has been exhibited at Mathaf in Doha, Darat al Funun in Amman, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He has received major international awards including the Sciences Po Prize for Contemporary Art in 2016 and the Arab Contemporary Creation Prize from the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2017. Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have is the second chapter of an itinerant project titled Land of Dreams, launched in Japan and set to continue in Portugal. In Dubai, the artist expands the introspective dimension of storytelling, encouraging viewers to reflect on the many ways self-representation can take shape. Through miniature drawings, cultural references, and reimagined domestic spaces, the exhibition explores the poetic potential of fiction as a tool for understanding reality.
