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Dia Mrad: Works;
Atelier 2214




Genocide I — 180x140cm

Re-signifying the everyday as a site of absence.
Conceived during a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, Atelier 2214 is a site-specific body of work that reflects on displacement, witnessing, and the proximity of histories. Created in a studio directly facing the Shoah Memorial, and during the early weeks of the 2023 Palestinian genocide, the project unfolds through textile-based interventions and appropriated street signage — quietly navigating the layered geography of trauma.

Drawing from pedestrian symbols, wayfinding systems, and the spatial logic of the city, Mrad constructs a visual language of movement, separation, and absence. These forms are reconfigured into a visual narrative of forced migration as an ongoing condition unfolding just beyond the studio window. The juxtaposition of Paris’s memorialised histories with unfolding violence elsewhere frames the work in a tense, unresolved temporality.

The studio becomes both site and subject: a space of retreat, confrontation, and reflection. Materials are minimal, but the referents are charged. By working within visual systems that typically guide the public — signs, arrows, markers — the project reclaims the authority of direction and reassigns it to those rendered stateless or invisible.

Atelier 2214 is less an exhibition than a calibration: a way of measuring the silence between what is seen and what is said. It extends Mrad’s ongoing interest in how objects, images, and spatial cues can carry historical weight, and how the built environment — even within the confines of a studio — can become a stage for bearing witness.



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

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

Exhibitions



11.01.2023–28.02.2023
Utilities
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 Next ProjectUtilities, 2023