Dia Batal is an Arab spatial designer based in London. The work she does is often context specific and enables audience and user to physically engage with it. She is interested in the way the design object functions as a device that has impact on people’s lives within the public and private space, in relation to its social, cultural, and political concerns.
The collection is a result of Dia’s interest in creating work that responds to her cultural identity in content and aesthetics. It is the outcome of an admiration of Arabic calligraphy and the traditional art of working with text. She borrows from that, and finds ways of creating limited edition pieces in a contemporary language. Dia uses a free style Arabic ‘type’ that she’s developed to create an object, and tell its story, while looking at the possible transformations of the text, in relation to its meaning, the space it occupies, and function of that object itself.
The Drinking Table comes from the Translations collection and it has a poem laser cut on its top, the poem reads: ‘’Cure me with the cause of my illness’’, it is a verse from The Wine Poetry collection by the controversial Arab poet Abu Nawwas, 8th century. The table has a compartment for hiding bottles of alcohol.
