Taysir Batniji, Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse — Érika Nimis

[Summer 2022]

By Érika Nimis

MAC VAL Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine
6.06.2021 — 9.01.2022

[Excerpt]
The Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne devoted a solo exhibition to Taysir Batniji, retracing with rare coherence more than twenty-five years of his art career in some fifty works: paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, performances. Born in Gaza in 1966, Batniji moved to Paris in 2007, when round trips between France (where he had developed his art career) and Palestine became difficult due to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from a quotation by Georges Perec (Espèces d’espaces, 1974; translated as Species Perec, who was a member of Oulipo, Batniji draws his materials from the infra-ordinary; playing with shapes and mixing genres, he composes a personal alphabet that subtly denounces hard realities.

Batniji takes inspiration from his experience of life, marked out by the hardships related to a Palestinian identity from which he cannot separate himself. It embodies all of his work, which is traversed by questions of displacement, borders, and exile as much as disappearance, absence, memory…
Translated by Käthe Roth

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 120 – FIGURES OF AFFIRMATION ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Taysir Batniji, Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse — Érika Nimis ]