Can you briefly introduce yourself?

I am a London based designer / artist. The multidisciplinary work I produce is context specific and audiences are often able to engage with it. I use Arabic language and text to create artworks that echo cultural and contemporary concerns into our urban public and private spaces. You can see some examples of my existing work here.

Dia Batal

How did you come up with the idea for your upcoming Mosaic Rooms show Tracing Landscapes – what is the meaning behind the title?

The first piece I started working on for the show was a print based on the names of Palestinian towns and villages in Palestine pre 1948. 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. That’s how the name came about. We had a few options but we thought this one worked best.

Many of the works in ‘ Tracing Landscapes’ are new. Can you give us a preview of what will be included… or a sneak peek of a piece you are currently working on? 

One of the main pieces is an installation entitled Playing on the Beach is a Dangerous Course. it is an attempt to create an ephemeral memorial for children killed in the attack on Gaza last year (2014). I have used the name of 30 children, embroidered on sheer fabric, to create this ‘mourning space’ .

Detail from ‘Playing on the beach is a dangerous course’

There are also two pieces in metal which look at ideas of memory and belonging, I have used the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish for these.

I Come from there and I Remember can be rotated to direct to a place, borrowing from navigational tools.

‘I come from there’ under construction

There’s an animation that I’ve been working on with Maya Chami, in which we go over recordings of my Palestinian grandmother’s journey when she was forced to leave Palestine in 1948. We are using drawings and text to do so.

Other pieces include silkscreen prints on paper, and drawings on paper.

You use the traditional art of Arabic calligraphy as the basis for many of your designs. Can you tell us why it inspires/interests you?

My mother (Mona Saudi) is an artist and sculptor who used poetry in her work, and my father (Hasan Al Batal) is a journalist who writes political columns, in addition to this I was surrounded by the works of people like Kamal Bullata and Samir El Sayegh and so growing up I was very much influenced by my surroundings and grew up to appreciate Arabic calligraphy.

I was also interested in the idea of using this ancient Arab and Islamic art of using text on objects, in architecture and public space. So I tried to modernize this using contemporary techniques and materials. I try to tell stories by doing so, mostly stories which echo contemporary social and political concerns.

Kun man anta, Dia Batal

Apart from your Mosaic Rooms show, are you planning/working on any other projects right now? Where should we look out for your work next?

I have some private commissions that I’ll be working on after the show. And I’ve been invited to take part in the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennale in 2016. And a show at the Jacaranda images in 2016 too.

Dia Batal’s Tracing Landscapes exhibition will be on show at The Mosaic Rooms 9 – 27 September 2015. Entry is free. Find out more here.

Q1/ You are currently exhibiting your solo show Garden State at The Mosaic Rooms, can you tell us briefly about what inspired it and what it includes?

The show consists of two photographic room installations of works made in Israel/Palestine; Wounded is made up of nine photographs suspended from the ceiling with a sound installation, and Gardening the Suburbs is a photographic wall installation of 110 pictures, which wraps the whole of the main gallery.

Through both works, I look at the politics of gardening and cultivation. I was interested in exploring ways in which a civilian occupation is made manifest through the shaping of the landscape, through suburban gardening, and the planting of forests and designation of National Parks.

For Gardening the Suburbs I made photographs of public and private gardens in twenty-two different Israeli settlements. The wall installation loosely maps the way the settlements move inland from the coastal areas, around the Green Line and into the West Bank. The pictures are clustered according to geographical location.

I am interested in what gardens mean, what they might represent. Gardens help to ‘normalise’ these settlements. They also mean that people intend to stay; they are literally putting down roots. So gardens are a useful tool for the State to take land and hold onto it. What’s more, in the imagination, a house and garden is rarely seen as a violent weapon of occupation.

Gardening The Suburbs (2014), Corinne Silva. Photo Andy Stagg

Q2/ What do you hope viewers will take away from the work in the show?

I don’t allow the viewer to get a wider sense of each place in the photographs. I encourage the viewer to imagine what lies beyond, behind, around. I also offer some cracks and fissures and breaks; pictures where rocks don’t properly join with brickwork, for example. The façade of the Israeli State is not seamless, and I want to think about the potential for future change in this place. If these places were built, and are allowed to continue to exist, it is because the Israeli State narrative is a powerful one that has taken hold of people’s imaginations. Places, landscapes, exist in the imagination before they exist materially. If the imagination is employed so powerfully to construct these places, how might it be used to deconstruct them.

The Wounded work also connects to my interest in cycles of occupation, colonisation and decolonisation. Two weeks before I arrived in Israel/Palestine in 2010, a forest fire in the Carmel Forest in the north, above Haifa, had destroyed acres of forest and taken the lives of a dozen people. For the installation, the large-scale photographs of the burnt trees are suspended from the ceiling throughout the room, hung at human height: you encounter them in a very physical way. The sound throughout the space is from a recording I made when I returned to the forest three years after the fire. I discovered that the trees planted by the State, largely oak and pine, had not been replaced. Instead the flora that was there before the planted forest had been allowed to grow. This foliage was now waist high, and I made a sound recording of me walking, stumbling, dragging myself through this new/old plant life.

Wounded (2013), Corinne Silva. Garden State at The Mosaic Rooms. Photo Andy Stagg

Q3/ What are you working on right now? Do you have any further exhibitions planned?

I am showing Imported Landscapes in a group show at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, which opens at the end of May and I have just got back from a month-long residency with AADK in Murcia, Spain. I made a number of walks in the landscape, and I’ll be developing work from that over the coming months, again looking at the politics of cultivation as well as walking practices.

Rocks and Fortresses is my other work in Spain, which I’ll be continuing in Egypt later this year. I am making photographs of rocks and fortresses along the Mediterranean coastlines. In each location, I gather earth or rock from the place I make the photograph and use this to make pigments. This I use to paint out the skies of the black and white photographs I make. The sky becomes the earth, and the photographs alongside one another reveal the reds, oranges and yellows of these connected landscapes. By painting out the skies I’m referencing early photographic processes, such as paper negatives, where the skies would be painted with black gouache.  This is a way for me to think about the role landscape photography has had – since its inception – in empire building. And of course, the Mediterranean has been the site of empire after empire, since the time of the Phoenecians. Fortresses for me represent separation, be that an individual’s desire to lock oneself away in a gated community, or military or nation state boundary making. Geological formations are the element that binds these landscapes; they are the connecting points.

Finally, later this year The Mosaic Rooms and Ffotogallery are publishing my forthcoming book, Garden State, with contributions by Eyal Weizman and Val Williams.

Garden State will be on show at The Mosaic Rooms until 20 June 2015. Entry free. Plan your visit here.