Bady Dalloul: Building Worlds of Matchboxes and Memories

Bady Dalloul has always lived between worlds, and he prefers it that way. Born in Paris to Syrian parents in 1986, his life was shaped by movement: between France and the Arab world, between languages, between what he was told and what he could imagine. “Whenever people suggest you choose between two choices, you always have the choice to choose both,” he asserts. That logic, that freedom from logic rather, sits at the heart of his work.

Much of Dalloul’s practice returns to childhood as a mode of fantasy. “It started as a game during childhood, when my brother Jad and I created these notebooks during long summer visits to family in Damascus,” he shares. “We imagined ourselves as kings of fictional countries; Jad had ‘Jadland’ and I had ‘Badland’. The more we wrote and drew, the more these countries became real. Without realising it, this game became a way for us to make sense of our everyday lives, a method of finding meaning in a confusing world.”

Those games became the blueprints for his current work, which continues to question how power and narrative shape belonging. The imaginary nations of his childhood were never utopias but experiments, places to test what it might mean to exist outside official history, whatever that term even means.

Dalloul’s practice doesn’t connect east and west but seeks to scramble coordinates entirely. His interest lies in what happens when cultural codes collide and create new ones, which is partly what drew him to Dubai. “What struck me is the diversity of backgrounds working together in an environment that has tremendously developed over the last few decades. For me, Dubai is a concentrate of the 21st century, encapsulating the hottest topics of our era,” he explains.

Now based in the city and soon leaving for Lisbon to explore theatre, Dalloul builds universes that blur history and fiction until they become indistinguishable. His touring exhibition, Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have, is an open diary of sorts, written in miniature through dozens of tiny drawings. The title comes from a self-portrait he made in Tokyo, a nod to the humour and childlike wonder that runs through his work.

In the show’s centrepiece installation, a reconstructed apartment modelled after his own live-in studio, visitors step into a living archive. Sketches and endless matchboxes line the walls, each holding a memory fragment or fantasy—and that layering is no accident. Dalloul grew up surrounded by art. Both his parents, Laila Muraywid and Ziad Dalloul, are celebrated artists who steeped him in the language of imagery.

“What I had during my childhood was an obsession of collecting materials to reimagine them, to create my own world, my own place with its history and characters,” he recalls. “But although this habit was taking up so much of my time, I was not able to understand it at all. It just made sense in my head. It was throughout my twenties at the Beaux-Arts of Paris [school] that I found out how to link my practice with my story.”

His ongoing matchbox drawings, of which there are over 800 and counting, turn the machinery of empire and memory into intimate storytelling devices. “I would like to not be labelled only by my background or languages, and open the imaginary borders that box conversations,” he says. He describes his move to Japan in 2021 as a transformative point in his creative work. “I was able to change the narrative that was expected from me as a person of Syrian heritage raised in Paris,” he says. “I was able to own my own narrative for the first time in my life.”

In the end, what Dalloul wants is simple, and maybe that’s what makes it so integral: “I aspire for dialogue with people I disagree with, a world in which we’re not out to convince others but understand each other’s point instead.”