Lebanese artist-photographer Dia Mrad maps the hidden systems that runs everyday life in the Arab region. From energy grids to improvised fixes, his work spans photography, installation, and architectural research, with showings at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Cité internationale des arts (Paris), and Misk Art Institute (Riyadh). He’s based in Beirut, and it shows: the city’s texture, pressure, and wit pulse through his images.
Ahead of We Design Beirut 2025, KHAMSA sat down with Dia to talk PSI 01 (Power Supply Indicator 01) — his first sculptural installation and a new chapter in his practice. The work builds on a years-long engagement with informal infrastructures, visual systems, and the material conditions of collapse. In this conversation, we trace the arc from his photographic documentation of Beirut’s post-blast spaces to his recent experiments with objects.
١. How do you now approach the interplay between structure and narrative, especially as your work expands beyond photography?
Architecture was the starting point for my work, both as subject and method. Photography allowed me to approach buildings as forms, but also as traces of lived conditions.
I was interested in how space holds memory, how it absorbs political and infrastructural pressures, how it shifts through time and use.
As the work developed, I found myself drawn to the systems that shape these structures: electricity, demolition, informal construction, materials in circulation. My practice now includes installations and sculptural objects, but the logic remains the same. I work through framing, sequencing, and spatial composition. Structure becomes a way of thinking, not just something to document. Narrative emerges from the behavior of materials, the flow of energy, or the way a surface registers use.
٢. In The Morning After, you document the impact of the 2020 Beirut port explosion. How did this event shape your perspective on the role of visual work in collective memory?
The Morning After was made in the immediate aftermath of the Beirut blast. I was photographing spaces that had been torn wide open, suspended in a strange stillness. The work wasn’t about ruins or aftermath; it dealt with interruption, with the disorientation of things left as they fell.
That experience deepened my understanding of what it means to document. Photography became a way of holding a moment that had not yet settled into memory. It carried the possibility of testimony while demanding care around representation. I became more aware of how images circulate, how they frame events before language does. Since then, I’ve worked with greater attention to what it means to capture something and to release it into the world.
٣. Your recent projects include Utilities, Power Shifts, and now PSI 01. How did this progression unfold?
In 2023, I presented Utilities, a photographic study of solar panels, water tanks, and generators across Beirut. With this work, my focus shifted from architecture itself to the systems that sustain it. These were not background elements; they were infrastructures in plain sight, structuring everyday life through informal means.
Power Shifts, shown at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, continued this line of thinking. I presented aerial photographs of solar installations on horizontal plinths, compressing the city’s surface into a readable interface. The work treated rooftops as spatial fields where energy, architecture, and adaptation intersect.
That led to Power Shifting, a written essay in which I explored energy as a psycho-spatial force. Drawing on psychoanalysis, I considered how delay, dependency, and desire shape the ways energy is distributed and perceived. These ideas eventually culminated in PSI 01, my first sculptural work. The piece connects directly to a home’s electrical board and uses visual indicators to signal the current source of electricity. The object contains collapse rather than try to represent it. For me, it marked a shift from documenting the condition to constructing an object that registers it.
٤. Can you walk us through your process when selecting and framing a subject within urban landscapes?
My process often begins with observation over time. I look for systems that reveal themselves slowly: a cluster of dishes, a tilted water tank, an improvised bracket holding a façade in place.
I tend to notice what’s been added, what’s decaying, or what’s holding something together.
When framing, I work toward neutrality. I avoid drama or distortion. A frontal view or soft light allows the system to assert its own logic. I try not to aestheticize, but to register. These are not images of beauty; they are records of functionality, of how things are made to work, patched together, or left unresolved.
٥. How does your Lebanese context inform your visual language, especially in your treatment of infrastructure and improvisation?
In Lebanon, systems are always partial. Infrastructure is fragile, and adaptation becomes a skill. You grow up learning to read space not only for what it offers, but for what it withholds. That teaches a kind of spatial awareness, how to sense the invisible structure behind a façade, how to decode a city through its wiring, its water tanks, or its workarounds.
This context shaped my eye. Beirut is not just the location of the work; it shaped the way the work thinks.
The city teaches a logic of improvisation and repair that now lives inside the practice.
٦. What technical or situational challenges have you encountered in your photographic practice?
A lot of my work depends on access. Getting the right shot often means climbing, negotiating, or finding an unexpected vantage point.
I’ve stood on dumpsters or knocked on doors to reach a roof. These are minor negotiations, but they are shaped by the same conditions I’m photographing.
Lighting is another ongoing challenge, especially in damaged interiors or unlit spaces. I often work handheld in low light, adjusting to the scene rather than setting it. In the Sursock Palace, after the blast, I shot handheld at high ISO using only the ambient light from a collapsed ceiling. The space dictated the rhythm of the capture.
٧. How do you think about the viewer’s role in your work?
I think of the viewer as someone entering a system already in motion.
The work is not made to be interpreted; it is made to be encountered.
Whether it’s a photograph or a sculptural piece, it holds its own logic and offers a structure for attention.
The viewer may feel a kind of recognition or disorientation, or both. The work doesn’t resolve itself. It insists on its condition and invites the viewer to stay with it, without requiring translation.
٨. What directions are you exploring now?
I want to keep working with systems that shape how we live without always being seen as such. So far, I have focused on energy, infrastructure, demolition, and informal architecture. I am now thinking about air, data, and signal as structures that govern or condition space.
I am also thinking about how to compress certain ideas into objects. Some of the new work leans more into sculptural forms that behave as signals or indicators. Others continue through photography. I am interested in creating frameworks that carry forward the questions I have always had, while letting the form adapt to what each subject requires.
