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Arabic Calligraphy Explores Identity and Loss

London-based designer Dia Batal gives Palestine's plight a visual form with her stylized scripts and sculptures.
Installation shot, Tracing Landscapes exhibition. All photos by Andy Stagg and courtesy of Mosaic Rooms.

The London-based spatial designer Dia Batal uses Arabic calligraphy as a vehicle to explore notions of identity, memory and migration. In her latest exhibition at Mosaic Rooms, a non-profit center of contemporary Arab culture and art, her stylized script is brought to life through various mediums, from silkscreen prints, to embroidery and works in metal.

“My style developed with time as I refine the details. I constantly do this. The fact that it’s so free in form helps me redefine it, as the materials I use and context change,” Batal tells The Creators Project.

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On Being, 2015. Powder coated metal, edition of 7.

Her multimedia works make connections between fragmented histories of loss and displacement. The exhibition title,Tracing Landscapes, was inspired by a print based on the names of towns and villages in Palestine before 1948—one of the first pieces Batal created for the show. “As this work progressed, and I started working on other pieces, it became clear that what I was doing was literally tracing over landscapes that have been altered, including people, narratives and places,” she says in an interview.

In another piece, an animation created in collaboration with Maya Chami, she weaves the story of her own grandmother’s exile from Palestine. The concepts of home and belonging, and how these are defined and internalized, are also central in I am from there, a metal object inspired by compasses and other navigational tools.

I am from there, 2015. Powder coated metal.

Since most of her work is context specific, Batal’s choice of materials is determined by the underlying concept. For example, an embroidered piece entitled Playing on the Beach is a Dangerous Course was conceived as a memorial to Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes in summer 2014. “The piece was dedicated to four boys killed on the beach of Gaza, who come from the same fisherman family. I used materials from that environment: cross stitch embroidery to write the names of 30 Palestinian children killed during the attack last year, panels of sheer muslin, and fishing lines and rods to hold the panels.”

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Batal was born in Beirut in 1978 and moved to London to pursue studies in fine arts and interior architecture. She cites her mother, an artist who has used poetry in her own work, as an artistic influence, as well as the calligraphic works of Kamal Boullata and Samir Sayegh, which piqued her interest in “using language in art as a comment on different social and political issues.”

Playing on the Beach is a Dangerous Course, 2015

Her creative exploration of these issues is just beginning: “I feel there is so much to be said and done around the topic of belonging to places that no longer exist, and stories of taking refuge, and what we carry with us while moving from a place to another. I want to explore these ideas further in new pieces, and elaborate further on existing pieces.”

Alphabets of the Arab World, 2011-2012. Silkscreen print on paper, edition of 32.

Homage to a Homeland, 2015. Silkscreen print on paper, edition of 50

The Tracing Landscapes exhibition is part of the London Design Festival, and closes September 27. To see more of Dia Batal’s work, go here.

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