Inner Child

2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:35 minutes

With Inner Child , Bady Dalloul continues his ongoing reflection on migration and belonging, putting in balance levantine and Japanese histories. The most recent in a series of works gathering images and sounds from the different countries the artist lived or worked in, this video is part of a multi-channel sound installation that aims to transport us into a meditative state. To do so, the artist worked with Mami Nakanishi, a trained hypnotherapist, to write a script that could reflect an internal and multilinguistic dialogue that alternates between Arabic, English, French, and Japanese. Still frames of sea landscapes; gardens; the sunset over a city; streets; and billboards come one after another, following the rhythm dictated by the narrator’s body. His breath seems to chant the movement of the waves, his voice sings and tells tales for us, his hands clap to scroll the images. A wave is coming , he says. Mimicking the sensation and perception in the womb, also surrounded by salted water, the film invites us to travel inward and outward, to reach our, or their, inner child. By doing so, the artist intends to draw a parallel between birth and immigration: if all knowledge comes from experience, when one departs for a foreign land, for a brand new context, one needs to learn all over again; one is a child again. Frappe dans tes mains et le jour va renaître , he says

Bady Dalloul cunningly employs collage across various media: texts, drawings, video, and objects to produce powerful works commenting on the past and the present. His collages imply a construction, the fabrication of a space that is simultaneously autobiographical, critical, poetic and narrative. Thus, he makes narratives where the real and fiction, and individual and collective experiences, enter into a permanent dialogue questioning the official historical grand narratives. The artist conceived of a fragile book, tattered by time and long use. It’s a diary, and he has patiently filled every page. He has taken notes ever since his childhood spent in Paris and Damascus, cutting out and pasting in illustrations from history magazines and books to make up stories like Badland (1999–2004). His practice began as a way to keep busy and counter boredom and the incomprehensibility of the crisis that has held Syria in its grip for decades. For 5 years, he filled his notebooks with definitions, notes on events, information (scientific, geostrategic, military, economic and historical) and maps. A long-term project guided by a question, an obsession: do images represent the truth of our world?