Photobook Mania 02 / Taysir Batniji presents Disruptions

Where: Sugar Paper | Via Cassiani 188/a | Modena, Italy

When: 6 May 2024, 7.30pm - 9pm

Admission: Free

About the event

The second appointment of Photobook Mania, our photobook-related cycle, will take place on Monday 6 May hosted by and in collaboration with Sugar Paper in Modena.

Taysir Batniji will present his book Disruptions, published this February by Loose Joints.

The Palestinian artist 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 phone call 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.
Announced on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the publication of Disruptions calls for peace and stands in support of the legitimate struggle for Palestinian freedom. 100% of the profits will go towards the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, providing crucial medical care and support on the ground.

A fundraiser, aimed at supporting the same NGO, will be held during the evening. Some copies of the book will be available to be purchased and signed by the author.

Bio

Taysir Batniji (1966, Gaza, Palestine) was trained as a painter at An-Najah National University, Nablus, prior to continuing his studies in France. His work incorporates photography, video, drawing, installation, and performance, often tinging with impermanence and fragility, drawing 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, at the end, poetic, sometimes acrid, point of view on reality.

Already involved in the Palestinian art scene since the nineties, he multiplied his participation, since 2002, in a number of exhibitions, biennials and residencies in Europe and across the world. Among others: Venice and Berlin Biennials, Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Rencontres d’Arles, Aperture in New-York, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Vienna Kunsthalle, Witte de With in Rotterdam and V&A Museum in London.

Taysir was awarded the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2012 and became the recipient of the Immersion residency program, supported by Hermes Foundation, in alliance with Aperture Foundation in 2017. His works can be found in the collections of many prestigious institutions of which the Centre Pompidou and the FNAC in France, the V&A and The Imperial War Museum in London, the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia and Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi.