Taysir Batniji – Disruptions, 2015-2017

Taysir Batniji’s work draws as much on the artist’s personal memories as on the turbulence of history and the present. His multidisciplinary practice — drawing, installation, sculpture, performance, photography and video — has a metaphorical, poetic dimension. Through his exploration of the private and the public spheres, of displacement and obstruction, memory and disappearance, Taysir Batniji presents a shifting definition of his own identity, which has been shaped geographically and culturally by both the Middle East and the West.

Disruptions is composed of screenshots of video conversations on WhatsApp between Taysir Batniji, his mother and various members of his family in Gaza; they were recorded between 2015 and 2017. The work keeps track of personal and private exchanges that were frozen and interrupted by a poor Internet connection. Distorted, pixelated and saturated with colour, these fragmentary images give a sense of the fragility of the family connection, maintained however in spite of the distance. Fashioned and destabilised by the same forces that daily affect the artist’s family and friends, digital space has become a reflection of communication that is subject to monitoring and surveillance.