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Dia Mrad: Works;
Power Shifts




Utilities, Zawyeh Gallery, Dubai, 2023.

The politics of infrastructure and collapse.Power Shifts is a photographic series that extends the research and visual language developed in Utilities, focusing specifically on the informal solar infrastructures proliferating across Beirut in response to Lebanon’s economic collapse and energy crisis. Following the near-total failure of the national electrical grid, entire neighborhoods adapted through decentralized solar systems — an uncoordinated, citizen-driven reconfiguration of the city’s energy landscape.

The images capture dense rooftop arrays, precarious installations, and the new material vernaculars emerging around them. Solar panels, inverters, and batteries are treated not simply as technologies, but as material witnesses to the redistribution of power — both electrical and political. Rooftops become contested sites where resilience, inequality, and abandonment are spatially negotiated.

Rather than framing these adaptations as heroic or dystopian, Power Shifts reads them as architectural and infrastructural facts — fragments of an emergent civic condition forged by collapse. The work positions solar infrastructure as both symptom and proposition: evidence of systemic failure, and a glimpse into decentralized futures.

Presented at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023, Power Shifts was exhibited within a broader curatorial framework addressing informal infrastructures across the Global South. In this context, Mrad’s photographs contributed to a regional conversation on how communities reengineer their environments under duress, and how improvisation silently redraws the political geography of the city.



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