My strong recommendation: head to Jameel Arts Centre before February 22, 2026, to see "Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have" — the first UAE show by Syrian-French multimedia artist Bady Dalloul.

"Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have" is the second chapter in Dalloul’s nomadic "Land of Dreams" exhibition series, first presented in Tokyo last year. Both chapters revolve around the theme of migration, which Dalloul has lived firsthand: born in France to Syrian parents and later moving to Japan — an entirely different world.

Blending autobiography with global politics, Dalloul’s work reexamines colonial histories, migration and memory, using everyday materials as intimate frames for storytelling. The exhibition features his new series Age of Empires, delicate matchbox drawings connected to his Syrian roots, and an immersive installation inspired by his Dubai studio — uncovering the unexpected connections he forges across cultures and empires.

— Bady, as someone who loves playing with words and letters, I am especially curious about the title. What is the deal with the cat?

— I have never had a cat, by the way! And this is the first self-portrait I ever made.

During my first year in Japan, in 2021, I came across a beautiful book by Hussein Al-Barghouti, a Palestinian writer. It is called The Blue Light. The French edition featured a painting by the surrealist Egyptian artist Abdelhadi El-Gazzar. The figure in the painting was holding a cat.

The book resonated deeply with me. Al-Barghouti wrote about moving to a small city on the Pacific coast of the U.S., walking at night, and how dreams and reality blurred together. There was ecstasy, sadness, and happiness all at once — discovering a new place, its quietness, and how it echoed scenes from his childhood, his relationship with his parents, and the loneliness of being far from friends and familiar faces.

This mirrored my own experience in Japan. I didn’t leave an occupied land like him, but to grow, to pursue my dreams, I had to leave behind the place of my habits. In that sense, we shared something. My parents had also left Syria in the 80s, during a difficult time, to continue their studies abroad. I saw a parallel between their story and mine: leaving the culture you were born into, stepping beyond it, while still trying to carry it with you.

That is how I imagined creating a parallel portrait. I replaced the original figure with myself, placed a battle scene from Japanese history in the background, and added fragments of Tokyo. And the cat — because in my heart I wanted one in my apartment, even though I can’t, since I am allergic.

— If I am not mistaken, you first explored the theme of migration in your Land of Dreams project at the Mori Art Museum. Now, with the exhibition in Dubai as its second chapter, could you tell me how it all began? What led you to dedicate this project to migration? Because migration — regardless of wealth or passport — always carries a sense of trauma, of being far from home.

— It is a beautiful question.

My whole practice began through a game — actually, through a game with my younger brother. We imagined ourselves as kings of fictitious countries. When we visited our grandparents in Damascus, Syria, we created “Jadland” and “Badland.” The more we wrote about these countries, the more real they became to us. We made collages, imagined buildings, pavement patterns, and even the uniforms of the police.

I can now say that those countries were simply a reflection of what we were seeing, or at least what we could understand at the time. They were the product of the tremendous contrasts in culture, politics, and history between Syria and France. Lebanon, still in civil war during the 1990s. Iraq, under Saddam Hussein. These were things we were told about or saw ourselves on the constantly running television, in every conversation, and in the streets of Damascus — military tanks, soldiers, and equipment. It was such a stark change from Paris, where we never saw a single soldier, at least not until we were teenagers.

This contrast gave me the idea of an inner world different from the one we lived in. At home, we had our own language and habits, different from the majority outside. That, along with the migration stories of my parents and relatives, shaped me. A large part of my father’s family had migrated to Venezuela in the 1950s, and many of them eventually left again for the U.S. just five or six years ago, when the situation there collapsed.

I think I wanted to experience this myself — not out of simple curiosity, but to understand it with my own body and life. When I graduated from the fine arts school in Paris, the Syrian civil war was at its peak. People expected me to speak about Syria, the Levant, my heritage. And of course, it mattered to me, because the news, the testimonies from family still in Syria, and the stories of friends leaving — all of it weighed heavily. I needed a way to process this visually, to translate and digest it.

But at the same time, I was frustrated. Conversations in Paris always seemed to start in the same place: Syria or France. Nothing else. After visiting Japan for the first time in 2014, I felt an incredible shift. It was a country where I shared no cultural background, yet I found points of inspiration everywhere. Later, in 2021, I entered Japan just as the borders were closing due to COVID, to begin a long-term residency at Villa Kujoyama. Once there, I realised that simply being in Japan, working, was itself a reflection of everything that had come before. Conversations started differently.

After three years in Japan, when I left, I found myself speaking with people about miniature painting, about Japan, about things I wasn’t “supposed” to be talking about as a French-Syrian. For me, that is one of the most important accomplishments of my life: being able to talk about something else.

So, when I exhibited at the Mori Art Museum — the most important private museum in Japan — and spoke about migration, it felt like sharing not just my voice, but the voices of many foreigners, and even some Japanese, who are part of the country but less represented than in Europe, where migration is always at the centre of public discourse.

— If I remember correctly, in Land of Dreams, the centrepiece was a replica of your first apartment. Why did you choose to recreate it?

— I have always worked at home, and I like that. My different homes over the years were also the places where I imagined my fictitious countries — spaces where I could feel at ease, dream, and be alone. Therefore, it felt natural to display works in an environment that reflected the place where they were created.

At the Mori Art Museum, I didn’t want to reproduce my apartment exactly, but rather to evoke the feeling of a domestic context. I wanted furniture that could make the works settle naturally into the space — alongside a fridge, a working table, chairs, a sofa. It wasn’t meant to be a mausoleum of my presence, but simply a space inspired by the features of an ordinary apartment.

In Japan, I lived in a modest, old Tokyo apartment. For the exhibition, I asked if we had the budget to build something that followed its codes. I brought some of my own furniture, and we completed the setup with other pieces.

— Which pieces of furniture were yours?

— My working table, two chairs, a bookshelf, a couple of table lamps — that was it. We added a few more tables to display the books I had made, along with other elements of the exhibition.

When the exhibition later travelled to Dubai, the approach shifted. The first version had been curated by Martin Germann, while the Jameel Arts Centre exhibition was curated by Lucas Morin, with whom I share a long-standing friendship. Together, we immediately imagined continuing this idea of “inside and outside the house,” but adapted to Dubai. Instead of recreating a Japanese apartment — which would have felt exotic and out of place — we designed something that resembled an ordinary Dubai flat, something visitors could relate to.

We included details like the skirting along the walls, fake switches that visitors could use to turn the lights on and off, and a few pieces of furniture: a sofa, a TV table, and two screens. One television in the “living room” played a film, while the second allowed visitors to sit down and watch the scrapbook piece.

— And in both chapters of the project, you use matchboxes with small drawings inside. Why matchboxes?

— I started drawing when I was a boy, together with my brother. As I mentioned earlier, we invented fictitious countries and tried to create everything a real country would have: banknotes, stamps, and so on. Stamps fascinated me in particular. They are so small, yet they carry an entire imagery of what a country chooses to show about itself. Some of the stamps we had in hand came from places we had never even heard of, and it was inspiring that such a tiny surface could contain such powerful images.

In 2016, when the images of the Syrian civil war were everywhere in France — at every newsstand, in every broadcast, in every conversation — there was no way to escape them. I began drawing them. It was, I think, a way to digest these images, to make them mine somehow, even if that sounds strange. I returned to what I had always done: collecting images. But this time I was drawing them, day after day — sometimes directly from what I saw, sometimes from imagination.

What began with the war evolved. Over the years, the drawings started to include scenes of my daily life, friends, and events beyond Syria, juxtaposed with the ongoing conflict that remained present. This practice has continued until today. I have drawn around 800 matchboxes so far.

At the Jameel exhibition, 173 of them were on display, different from the ones shown at the Mori Art Museum, and they represented scenes, images, and imagined moments from the past year up to now.

— What will we see inside these matchboxes? Are they mainly political, or is the content more diverse?

— The images offer variation. There are violent ones, but also images of softness and tenderness. Sometimes, political figures appear; sometimes, just ordinary people. You find familiar news images alongside unexpected combinations. Some are inspired by paintings, others by my friends. It is quite diverse, I would say, in what is displayed.

— Is there an artwork in the exhibition that feels especially personal to you — maybe one tied to a particular emotion, or to the period of your life when you created it?

— Among the works, I can talk about the film Ahmad, the Japanese. I began it when I arrived in Japan in 2021. It centres on an archetypal character named Ahmad — a figure built from many testimonies and stories shared by friends in Japan, France, and even Venezuela. All of them had migrated, and their experiences came together in this character.

Ahmad is a continuation of a figure first imagined by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in his poem Ahmad Al Zaatar. Darwish created a character born in a Lebanese refugee camp during the civil war — a person with no future. No access to education, no possibility to migrate, no horizon. Yet, at the same time, migration is the only possible path: a way to expand, sustain family, and also risk losing touch with family, culture, and home.

I reimagined this figure as someone who leaves and arrives in Japan — transforming from “Ahmad the Arab” into “Ahmad the Japanese.” This fictitious character tries to become as Japanese as possible, facing the struggle of starting from scratch in a new country. Migration becomes a kind of rebirth, as if every departure were both a blank page and a reincarnation.

When I think about it, many figures in history have faced this same situation — leaving parents, love, and culture in order to grow. Even Buddha did this to find fulfilment. It is a very difficult path.

That is how this film came about: a 45-minute reflection on this archetype of migration, transformation, and survival.

— Speaking of your personal experience, do you remember moments in Japan when you tried to “be Japanese”? What did you do to feel closer to the culture?

— This is my personal experience. There is no single way to live it. But growing up in Paris with a foreign background and being the eldest child in my family, I became aware very early of the need to behave in a certain way. Not only to be a law-abiding citizen, but also to be respectful, mindful of elders, and always “behave.”

When I went to Japan, it felt like a clean sheet. Everything was so different from my own culture. At first, I felt the need to act exactly as I had in Paris, to follow the same rules of conduct. But over time, I discovered that being far from everything I knew actually freed me. It freed me from the weight of expectations — of behaving in a certain way.

I stayed polite, of course, but I also began to accept myself more fully. In a sense, it was about embracing my otherness.

— Did you study Japanese?

— Yes, I did learn some Japanese during those three years. I could catch words and sentences, but it is a difficult language, with three different writing systems. Still, I never really felt the language barrier as something hard. On the contrary, it was very beneficial to my visual practice. It made me curious about things I might not have noticed if I could read them.

For example, entering a library and not being able to read a single book title pushed me to open books at random — because of their covers, or simply because they contained things I couldn’t understand at all. That sense of curiosity stayed with me even after leaving Japan.

This experience also fed directly into my work. For the exhibition in Dubai, I created a large new piece called Age of Empires. It was inspired by Japanese astrology books — popular since the 19th century — that link physical features like the shape of your hands, feet, nose, ears, eyes, or mouth to destiny, personality, and place of birth. The idea that everything is written from the start fascinated me.

I reimagined this framework by applying it to empires. I mixed elements of Noah’s Ark and the Deluge with Babylonian culture and archaeological artefacts, alongside fragments of the Russian, Japanese, British, and Portuguese empires. Across the pages, I brought together these histories with the idea of having “a country in your own room,” echoing the fictitious worlds my brother and I created as children with Jedland and Bedland.

All the pages share something in common: figures trying to stay focused, meditating amid chaos. Among the fragments, you can see walls — some recalling the Berlin Wall, others hinting at different dictatorships that collapsed without being named directly. In these images, people are holding their energy together, seeking concentration and balance in the midst of disorder.

The work consists of 46 double pages, conceived as a book. Alongside them are four additional elements, framed differently but forming part of the installation — witnesses to the 46 pages. Two soldiers flank the composition on the left and right, closing it. And four portraits appear, characters or archetypes observing the rise and fall of empires.

The first is a bright woman at the centre, gazing at it all. Stories of empires have often excluded women, and I wanted to imagine her presence — perhaps suggesting that if women had been part of those narratives, history might have unfolded differently.

The second is the disguised foreigner, who, after spending a few years in the region, adopted local dress and imagined themselves part of the fabric.

The third is a young diver, a small boy from ancient times, diving for pearls and surfacing again.

And the last is the guest. Dressed in Arab garb, he embodies the figure of the polite visitor — present, visible, but never fully speaking the word.

— As someone who has truly lived the experience of migration and even dedicated a project to it, where do you feel at home today?

— Difficult one, but I will try to answer it. I am very aware that there are different kinds of travellers today, and I am also conscious of my own privilege. Being born in France allows me to move quite freely, and that is not something I take for granted.

At the same time, I believe that in every house, in every apartment, there is a hero. There is always a story — someone doing their best in their own way — and that story is worth telling. It is just a matter of how I relate to it and whether I am allowed to speak about it and collaborate with the person who is willing to share.

This story of migration could apply to many places. In Tokyo, I worked closely with friends and acquaintances. Here in Dubai, I have done the same. And if I were to go somewhere else next year, I would try again in that new place. The world is full of heroes.