Disruptions is made of 39 selected screenshots—hazy, dated images, broken up because the network is distorted by the Israeli occupation. These were sampled on an impulse by the artist, during WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and various family members in Gaza between 2015 and 2017, the year of the artist’s mother’s death. Each line represents a dated conversation: 24/04/2015, 04/08/2016, 06/08/2016, 17/08/2016, 04/09/2016, 05/10/2016.
For years, Taysir Batniji couldn’t travel to his homeland due to the Israeli blockade imposed on Gaza in 2006. Through these images, he tried to hold on to the fleeting, bringing back the distant, familiar things that are missed, undoing frontiers by offering “part of that shared intimacy that stretches between two territories.”
The formal changes to these images, the “glitch” caused by blurred communication, is of both pictorial and dramatic interest. It involuntarily shifts the substance of these images, from being common, personal, and every day to the tragic range of the “image of war.” The series carries strong echoes to today, to the ongoing devastation of the Palestinian territory of Gaza. It is also
Taysir Batniji is a visual artist based in France, originally from Gaza. Working across photography, video, drawing, and installation, his practice reflects on impermanence, fragility, and displacement—merging personal history with political and historical realities. Batniji’s conceptual approach often distorts or reframes everyday subjects, offering poetic yet incisive perspectives on lived experience.
He has presented solo exhibitions at Mathaf, MAC VAL, Les Rencontres d’Arles, and Aperture Foundation, and participated in the Lyon and Berlin Biennales, the Venice Biennale, and institutions including the Centre Pompidou, V&A Museum, IVAM Valencia, and Mathaf Doha.
