'The Mosaic Rooms present a special exhibition of new multimedia works by spatial designer Dia Batal for London Design Festival. Batal uses the art of Arabic calligraphy to transform text into objects, which seek to engage audiences in contemporary issues of identity and belonging. In this exhibition, Batal not only re-envisions this traditional art but also conventional architectural forms and objects.
Suspended in front of one of the gallery windows, the designer has
created a Mashrabiya, a window screen customarily wooden and ornamental
in form. The designer’s fragmented interpretation is designed to act as a
memorial for the Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza
in summer 2014. Playing on the Beach is a Dangerous Course features
embroidered panels, using cross-stitch traditional to Palestinian
embroidery, with the individual names of 30 victims taken from the
records of the over 500 deceased. Dedicated to the four boys killed on
the beach, the piece examines shifting rituals and mourning spaces in
times of conflict. Tactile, delicate, and ephemeral, subject to temporal
changes in light and shade, this impermanent commemoration creates
space within a threshold, a possible place of remembering.
Ideas of home and belonging are looked at in two new pieces in metal.
Using text taken from the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Batal explores the
meaning of place in an age of migration and immigration, of moving here
but coming from there. One work draws inspiration from navigational
tools such as compasses. She creates an object that points to home, a
device to determine a psycho-geographical direction, a bearing full of
both intent and longing. Through the artworks, home is also signified as
an internal orientation, one that we guide to remain on our own course
of belonging.
This is further examined in the new multimedia work done in
collaboration with Maya Chami, in which the story of Batal’s grandmother
is unfolded through the fragmented narratives of a journey of
displacement. Forced to leave her home in Palestine, and never able to
return, this is an emotive animation that examines the significance of
involuntary departures from a homeland, and how and where the idea of
home can remain after such conflict.
By looking back the designer is also projecting forward. In an
attempt to create a learning resource for her own child, who is growing
up in a geographic location different to the one in which she was raised
in, she retraces and portrays elements of recalled landscapes. In a
series of silkscreen prints Batal uses alphabet posters to remember the
towns and cities of Palestine before 1948; in another she celebrates the
birds of the Arab world.'
Private View: Tuesday 8 September, 6.30 – 8.30pm. Free rsvp@mosaicrooms.org
*Please note the exhibition will also be open 11am-6pm 20, 21 and 27 September as part of The London Design Festival.
