Time to Go, a solo exhibition by Kuwaiti visual artist Dalal Al-Obaidi, curated by critical writer and cultural researcher Malak Al-Suwaihel.

 A visual study of the artist’s formative memories and stem-winding escapades of travel and trespass—beyond the bounds of her native Kuwait and within arbitrarily restricted spaces within Kuwait—is Time to Go. This corpus of work is an expeditious endeavor to document the ephemerality of the present—a fleeting moment  captured  only  by  the  sentiments  drawn-out  from Al-Obaidi’s powdered pastels and acrylic stains.

Through Al-Obaidi’s art is a woman consciously re-interpreting, reinserting her personal memory in the narratives of family history and collective memory. Conscious of its pink-misted idealization of a non-specific past, to the artist, ‘nostalgia’ remains a sense—a feeling that, while immaterial, is a sensory experience that awakens certain memories of the way life once felt. In a sense, what is aesthetically nostalgic—a superficial remembered pretense of nothing in particular—is undercut by the artist’s corporeal experiences of tender rememberings that compel both the artist herself and viewer to probe deeper.

Deeper still, the artist’s work triggers synapses and awakens forgotten neural-pathways, sublimating a visual connection shared in the space of what can only be termed as a Jungian collective unconscious. Arriving at the psychology of a collective memory—a scattered stream of consciousness that is untethered by form or tradition—Al-Obaidi counteracts the communal summoning of memory through what she calls her process of “method acting.” She envisions herself transmigrating into and living out the lives of those she’s captured in her art.

From the vantage point of this Kuwaiti artist, the urge “to go” is her artistic tendency through the sensory modalities of her expression to transgress boundaries and place herself anywhere. Al-Obaidi’s art and forms of expression carry her memories beyond space and time and all forms of inextricable boundaries.

Time to Go is an unexpressed refrain for something else, something new, something past, something quick, something now.