Opening: 23 September 2026, 5 - 8 pm
Exhibition Dates: 24 September – 11 November 2026
Opening Hours: Monday to Saturday, 11am to 7pm
Address: Taymour Grahne Projects, Warehouse 31a, Lane 4, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, UAE

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present 'Frogs, Jazz & Blisters’, a solo show by Kuwaiti artist Dalal Al-Obaidi, opening in Dubai on September 23.

In Frogs, Jazz and Blisters, her debut solo exhibition at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dalal Al-Obaidi takes us into a life split between two worlds, London and Kuwait.

Having studied a London-based art course remotely over the past few years, frequent trips to the UK capital were a regular feature of the artist's life. Since the course ended, Al-Obaidi has been in Kuwait, processing her kaleidoscope of experiences in the UK and making sense of being one person, open and attuned to inspiration everywhere, caught between two very different places.

This body of new paintings was sparked by considering what it means to live in two places, or "to be two Dalals" as the artist put it, without being entirely settled in either identity. The work was motivated by London, but inspired by life in Kuwait - a fairly accurate summation of the artist's life over the past few years.

The exhibition's title, a memorable phrase, came to Al-Obaidi one night in London, when recalling one particular night of friends, music, laughter and dancing. It describes, she says, the feeling of "coming down from a high", the gradual settling back to the quieter pace of life in Kuwait after a whirlwind of experiences, emotions and impressions in London.

"You settle back home and you really feel that sharp contrast between the stillness of the desert and everything else that was happening, all the jazz, the nights staying up, - and your feet hurt."

Each component word of the exhibition's title refers to a particular experience. Frogs came from a gig at London music venue Space Talk, where Dalal witnessed an artist incorporating frog samples into his music. Standing in the dark hall, the guttural croaking suddenly recalled childhood, and specifically, car journeys with her aunt who'd listen to new age and electronic music (complete with forest sounds) on the way to the family farm. Jazz refers both to the music she would seek out around London and in a looser sense, the lively pace and energy of London life. The blisters are partly literal - the result of long evenings spent standing or dancing in high heel shoes - but as Al-Obaidi recognises, they can be a metaphor for the physical persistence of memory. A blister can stand for "something sharp, that hurts," she explains, an especially vivid experience that scratches itself into the brain.

While these memories shape the exhibition's atmosphere, most of its fifteen works are concerned with Kuwait. "A lot of the works in this show are not necessarily about London," Al-Obaidi says. "They are more about Kuwait and how it affects the way I think about home." London provides a starting point from where Dalal explored her own impressions of Kuwaiti life, bringing its domestic spaces, popular entertainment and social conventions into sharper focus. As many expats have discovered, sometimes you need to leave home in order to better understand it.

One of the exhibition's central paintings, Dream Exchange, brings the two settings together. The work presents Pimlico Underground station populated by characters from Bye Bye London, a widely known Kuwaiti stage comedy. The play follows a Kuwaiti man who travels to London in search of another kind of life, before eventually returning home. Al-Obaidi places its characters within the Tube station she used regularly while studying in the city. Some characters look towards the viewer; others appear to float within the architecture. Dead palm trees, used as signs of home, are set against stairways that appear to offer different possible directions.

Al-Obaidi makes it clear, though, while she is not equating her own experience directly with the play's plot, she identifies with its protagonist's wish to "go out there and try to find another version of life that might suit him better." She also resonates with his eventual recognition that home is "what is true, and what is safe, and what will always be there." Even during some of her most enjoyable periods in London, she recalls feeling homesick and wanting to return to Kuwait.

Over time, however, and as the exhibition ebbs and flows across the 15 works, the distinction between Dalal's two selves has become less fixed.

"Wherever I go, I carry home," she says. "Wherever I go, I carry myself, and I can create a world for myself no matter where I'm placed."

Dream Exchange addresses this continuing movement between places, ambitions and possible lives. Its title recalls an encounter outside a London jazz venue, where a distressed musician, having been refused the chance to perform, pressed his guitar into a surprised Al-Obaidi's hands, as she queued at the entrance. She remembers being struck by the sadness of the failed musician, and the finality of his surrendering of his guitar into a stranger's hands. Was this really an abandoning of a dream or ambition?

In three related paintings, Al-Obaidi turns to a shared visual memory, familiar to generations of Kuwaitis. An old TV game show is the setting for a microdrama as presenters and audience members inhabit brightly coloured sets, that now appear distinctly of their time. Al-Obaidi describes the game show participants as "being picked," "being chosen," "participating" or simply "bystanding." The format allows her to place life within the structure of a televised game, in which individual agency jostles alongside chance and observation.

The game show's elaborate sets demonstrate another notable aspect visible in Frogs, Jazz and Blisters - a foundational shift in Al-Obaidi's palette. Although the works retain the dark reds and burnt oranges associated with her earlier paintings, Al-Obaidi's new compositions are generally brighter and less controlled. "My choice of colours this time is more loose and more vibrant," she concurs. The change does not remove the darker aspects of the work, but opens up narratives, bringing in twists of humour and irony alongside them.

Dalal's sense of humour is particularly evident in Phantom. A middle-aged Kuwaiti man stands near an expensive car in the desert, seemingly haunted by the apparition of a glamorous woman. There's a delicious satirical edge to this work, the exaggerated genie, the forlorn central figure next to his impressive automobile and a rather anonymous plastic chair, all combining into a sort of deflated pathos. For Al-Obaidi, the juxtaposition reflects a quirk of everyday life in Kuwait: "It doesn't matter how much wealth someone has. At the end of the day, they just drive out of the city, take a cheap plastic chair and sit somewhere in the desert."

Domestic interiors provide another form of social record. One painting Staircase, Kaifan reconstructs the blue interior of a relative's house. Immediately, in this charming depiction of a bygone era, we're in a childhood memory that exudes simple pleasures, peacefulness and security. In works such as this, Al-Obaidi combines observed details with intensified colour, to allow her remembered spaces to become psychological rather than documentary interiors.

A reimagined bedroom scene rounds out this collection, bringing together objects belonging to Al-Obaidi and her mother and providing an intimate comment on her relationship. Her own heels and purple fur scarf appear alongside the polka-dot dress her mother wore at her wedding and later stored in her daughter's wardrobe. The room also combines the pink-purple carpet of Al-Obaidi's childhood bedroom with the green walls her mother remembers from her own youth.

"I'm merging these two worlds," the artist says: "the past, with its tradition - and the present"

In Frogs, Jazz and Blisters, Al-Obaidi does not fix history but comments in numerous angles, how history is a living, pliant thing, subject to revision and complicated by what she has experienced elsewhere. The exhibition considers how those impressions persist - and how an artist might build out a workable present and identity, from lives and memories that cannot be reduced to a single place.

Dalal Al-Obaidi (b. 1996, Kuwait) studied at Central Saint Martins in London and lives and works in Kuwait. Her work has been the subject of solo presentations including Time to Go at Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2024), and Frogs, Jazz & Blisters at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai (2026). Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions including Five Painters at Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai (2026), I Am Not What I Am, I Become at Athr Gallery, Jeddah (2026), the MA Interim Show at Central Saint Martins, London (2025), Threads, Lincoln, UK (2024), and Ladies Drawing Club curated by Louise Fitzjohn (online, 2023).