Born in Gaza in 1966, Taysir Batniji graduated in arts from Al-Najah University in Nablus, Palestine (1994), and from the Bourges School of Fine Arts in France (1997). Taysir Batniji’s multi-media artwork, often tinged with impermanence and fragility, draws its inspiration from his subjective story, but also from current events and history. His methods of approach always distance, divert, stretch, conceptualize or simply play with the initial subject, offering, in the end, a poetic and sometimes acrid, point of view on reality. In recent years he has held solo exhibitions at Mathaf (2022), MAC VAL (2021), Les Rencontres d’Arles (2018); Aperture Foundation, New York (2018); Contemporary Art Space André Malraux, Colmar (2016); Marseille / Provence (2013); MAH, Geneva (2007); and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2004). His works were shown in the following group exhibitions: Lyon Biennale (2024), Berlin Biennale (2022), MAC VAL and Jeu de Paume (2019), Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2018); WK, Stuttgart (2017); IVAM, Valencia (2016); and Center Pompidou (2014), Istanbul Biennale (2011), Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin (2009). And in the Venice Biennale in 2011, 2009, 2003. Prominent collections include his works such as Mathaf, Doha, Center Pompidou, Paris, V&A Museum, London, IVAM, Valencia and WK, Stuttgart, among others.
Taysir Batniji
Disruptions
Disruptions series is made of thirty-nine selected screenshots —weak, dated images, broken up because the network is scrambled by the occupation— impulsively sampled by the artist during several WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and various family members in Gaza between 2015 and 2017, the year of the artist’s mother 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 evanescent, bringing back the distant, the familiar things that are missed, undoing frontiers by offering “part of that shared intimacy that stretches between two territories”.
The formal alteration of these images, the “glitch” caused by a blurred communication, is of both pictorial and dramatic interest. It involuntary shifts their common and personal, anodyne substance to the tragic range of the “image of war”, strongly echoing today with the ongoing devastation of the Palestinian territory of Gaza. This series is also sadly premonitory, as the places and people it depicts have partly disappeared now.
The entire series was published by Loose Joints in January 2024 in a 128-pages photo book, winner of Photobook of the Year, Paris Photo—Aperture Photobook Awards 2024.