Taysir Batniji
Disruptions

Exhibition Details

Disruptions is a collection of screenshots taken during several video conversations between Paris and Gaza, which took place from April 24, 2015 to June 23, 2017. In France, Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji calls his family on Whatsapp. Due to poor connection, the video is often disturbed by clouds of pixels. Sometimes we notice a green barrier, it looks like a second screen. Batniji cannot explain it. He starts collecting and archiving the traces of this digital noise.

The images in Disruptions need time. They are indirect: they do not represent the conflict, but an unexpected, ephemeral, alienating effect of it. They are slow: their power is revealed when looking for a long time, expanding the time of a warp that had appeared for a moment, and is now imprinted forever. In the act of capturing and cataloguing it, we find Batniji’s intuition of a deeper meaning.

The more we look at them, the more concrete this apparent abstraction becomes. Its compressed resolution materializes totalizing intrusion: it is the distortive power of violence, its infiltration into everyday life. These images testify to historical repression, and acquire new meanings as it intensified to the point of explosion this past year. They visualize the impossibility of private space, the disintegration of the last form of intimacy: the same forces that do not allow Batniji to return home, continue to keep him distant in digital space, the only commonground left.