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Dia Mrad: Works;
Utilities




Utilities, Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai, 2023.

The politics of infrastructure and collapse.Utilities is a photographic series that investigates the material expressions of Lebanon’s ongoing economic collapse. Focusing on the emergence of informal infrastructures — solar panels, water tanks, generators, armored bank facades — the series presents these objects not simply as technical responses to crisis, but as artifacts of a new civic condition.

Shot across Beirut, the images isolate and frame these elements with formal precision, drawing attention to their placement, repetition, and unintended monumentality. Rooftop arrays, cable tangles, metallic barriers: each becomes a sculptural index of systemic failure, private adaptation, and the silent redistribution of responsibility from state to citizen.

Rather than treating these utilities as metaphors or visual symptoms, Mrad positions them as active agents. In this body of work, infrastructure is not background — it is protagonist. The objects depicted are not just signs of breakdown; they are the breakdown, collapsed into form. They structure how we live, how we imagine resilience, and how cities reconfigure around dysfunction.

Utilities was first presented as a solo exhibition in 2023 and later integrated into Power Shifts at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, where it contributed to a regional conversation on informal systems and urban improvisation. In each context, the work operates as both aesthetic document and political anatomy, mapping the anatomy of collapse through its visible, material nodes.



Cistern I-VII, 2023100x30—40cm, archival print on cotton paper

Solar Tablet I-VIII, 202375x100cm, archival print on cotton paper

Exhibitions



09–10.2023
The Road to Reframe
Read More.


09–10.2023
Virtual Exhibition: 
Tradition of Change










 Next ProjectUtilities, 2023