Dalal Al-Obaidi - والله دنيا (Wallah Dinya)

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Kuwaiti painter Dalal Al-Obaidi’s (b. 1996) artwork spotlight, focusing on her powerful new painting والله دنيا (Wallah Dinya).  

 

Dalal Al-Obaidi’s haunting, contemplative works resist fixed definitions, instead crafting narratives that gesture toward expansive notions of personal and collective history through the quiet intensity of her subjects. In والله دنيا (Wallah Dinya), she presents an intimate and psychologically charged scene in which a male figure is positioned between the comforts of the present and the unresolved desires of a life imagined but unrealised.

 

Depicted in a state of restrained repose, the figure is seated before a television, absorbed in the image of a female singer whose hazy, dreamlike presence dominates the screen. As he gazes towards the woman on the screen, a figure who represents visibility and success, we are invited to consider what the subject has lost and what he continues to long for. In this tender yet powerful moment of reminiscence, the work asks whether his silent yearning stems from the loss of a former love, or from a more profound estrangement from himself and his own abandoned dreams. His admiration becomes a quiet question: might he once have imagined himself in her place? This ambiguity resists narrative closure and instead invites the viewer to project their own experiences onto the image.

 

The singer’s presence extends beyond the television screen, emerging in the centre of the composition from a plume of cigarette smoke. With her arms outstretched as she rises toward the chandelier, her spectral figure appears unbounded, in contrast to the male subject’s physical and psychological containment. Existing simultaneously as an image and as an atmosphere, she occupies both what he watches and what he breathes, binding him to a stifling cyclical process of longing and loss.