Bady Dalloul

Born in Paris in 1986, French-Syrian artist Bady Dalloul graduated from École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2015. Politics, sociology and history are at the heart of Dalloul’s research into how (hi)stories intersect, and his drawings, videos and objects forge a dialogue between fiction and reality that questions the very way in which history is written.

Dalloul’s works are included in the permanent collections of the MNAM-Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Mac/Val – Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val de Marne, the Ile-de-France Le Plateau regional contemporary art collection, the Institut du Monde Arabe and the Kadist Art Foundation. In 2017 he was awarded the Friends of the Arab World Institute (AWI) Prize for Arab Contemporary Creation. Dalloul’s work has been shown at Bibliothèque Nationale de France and at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Since 2011, several million Syrians have been forced to leave their country and make new lives elsewhere. In 2016, against this backdrop, the Japanese government, in partnership with the Japan International Cooperation Agency, announced that it would welcome 150 young Syrian men and women to Japan, to give them an opportunity to pursue their studies, find a new place to live and help rebuild their country when the time came. During his residency, Dalloul studied the experiences of some of these young people, following their personal trajectories, their discovery of this new environment, the social, cultural and private upheaval involved, and the ways this mirrored his own situation. He gathered his findings into a film, Mon Pays Imaginaire. A series of accompanying works provides deeper contextualisation of the process of discovery of, and integration into, a distant land where one has sought refuge.

Pour ses recherches à Tokyo, Bady Dalloul est accueilli à TOKAS – Tokyo Arts and Space Residency, dans le cadre du partenariat entre TOKAS – Tokyo Arts and Space Residency et la Villa Kujoyama.