Disruptions

Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s diverse practice is often tinged with impermanence and fragility, drawing inspiration from his subjective experience and its relation to current events and history. In Disruptions, Batniji collects fragmented screenshots taken between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017 during several WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and family in Gaza. Settled in Europe and unable to return to his homeland for years, this digital commons provided a crucial meeting ground for Batniji and his family: a digital space nonetheless shaped and destabilised by the same forces affecting the artist’s relatives in everyday life.

Disruptions oscillates between the casual domestic language of the family phonecall and warped, degraded compositions, saturated with colour, obliterated with pixels, eradicated by distance. Through resolution and compression, Batniji’s poor images politically visualize how communication and daily life in Gaza are compromised by conflict, control and surveillance. In their noise and visual obliqueness, Batniji creates a thread between common intimacy and the colonial, now genocidal violence imposed upon Gaza to date, while evoking the physical and emotional separation that occurs across borders.