A Harrowing Meditation on Documenting Life in Gaza

Taysir Batniji’s gift as an artist may well be his restlessness. He paints, he draws, he takes photographs and does performances. He has never settled on one mode of art-making or another. Some of his most memorable projects involve, for example, mounds of sand piled like seaside dunes on either side of an opened suitcase (Untitled, 1998–2021); bars of olive-oil soap engraved with an Arabic proverb and stacked onto a wooden palette (No Condition Is Permanent, 2014); a set of keys on a key ring, all rendered in delicate glass (Untitled, 2014); and molded pieces of Swiss chocolate, neatly arranged on a tabletop, that spell out article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” (Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone, 2007). 

Batniji’s images and object-based installations often depend on the presence of documents, texts, and symbols whose meanings are immediately clear. His best works, however, delve into more complicated material, where the arguments, by necessity, head into the unknown and take unexpected twists and turns. In those works, Batniji asks serious, often difficult questions (usually philosophical, ethical ones), and he leaves them wide open. Among them: Can documentary images expose events occurring in the world—namely, acts of violence, destruction, and dispossession happening in places where power is brutally contested—and call them facts? Or is it possible that abstract forms can be more effective in channeling the terrible consequences of such events, in part because they sidestep the issue of accepting images as truth and make viewers feel, or at least approximate, what it means to be suddenly thrown into confusion, disconnection, and horror? 

Batniji was born in Gaza. He left, against his family’s wishes, to study art in Europe in 1994. Those were the heady days of the Oslo Accords, when it seemed like a real peace deal between Israel and Palestine might be possible, before the assassination of Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and, soon after, the ascension of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now held office in Israel longer than anyone and has become, in the words of New York Times columnist and pundit Thomas Friedman, “the worst leader in [Israel’s] history—maybe in all of Jewish history.” For ten years, Batniji was able to go back and forth between Gaza and France. The trip was often terrible. 

In 2003, Batniji was detained for three days at Rafah, on the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which was occupied by Israel at the time (in mid-February, Israel was poised to launch an aggressive ground invasion of Rafah despite international outcry). Due to the security and surveillance regime, Batniji was unable to document his detention in Rafah with his camera, but he replicated the listlessness and anger of being there, the intimidation and exhaustion, and the fights and desperation that broke out among men in a cinematic series of pencil drawings on paper titled Transit #2 (2003). Two years later, Israel abruptly withdrew from Gaza. A power struggle between Fatah and Hamas ensued. Hamas took over the local government, at which point Israel imposed a punishing blockade. Although Batniji harbors a dream of returning to Palestine permanently, it has been impossible for him to enter Gaza since 2006. In the intervening years, he has turned the experience of exile into a kaleidoscopic practice, venturing as far as to the Palestinian diaspora in the United States, the subject of his 2018 Aperture book and exhibition Home Away from Home, to consider the complicated relationship of racism and colonialism to national-liberation struggles.

Batniji’s most recent publication, Disruptions (2024), published by Loose Joints this winter, offers a harrowing meditation on the tensions between the impulse to document reality and the potential for abstraction to communicate something more. The book is only 128 pages long, with a short, evocative text at the back written in French by the writer and photography historian Taous R. Dahmani and translated into Arabic and English. A nervy watercolor from Batniji’s 2022 series Fading Roses appears on the front cover, laid over what appears to be a beautiful blue sky but is more likely, and effectively, an error screen on the artist’s mobile phone. 

These images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die.

Disruptions follows a sequence of around seventy images, divided by dates ranging from April 2015 to December 2016. All of these images are screenshots that Batniji took during WhatsApp calls to his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots capture moments of communications breakdown. They show the glitches, frozen pictures, and dropped signals of video calls failing in their promise to connect in real time. Page after page of Batniji’s book reveals eruptions of wild pixelation, accidental grids, and intense waves of blue and green, which might have suggested verdant landscapes and dazzling seas if they weren’t so obviously the colors of broken tech. Every so often a face appears, or parts of a face, showing a sudden smile, a look of uncertainty, palpable fear, distress, or expressions of soul-sucking fatigue. As soon as one begins to recognize buildings and street scenes, it looks as though the very same buildings and street scenes are exploding on the following pages. 

The images that make up Disruptions are therefore already a consolation, with the video call as the next best thing to meeting his loved ones face to face, embracing them, and feeling their warmth. But given everything that has happened in Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal in 2006, including several major bombing campaigns by Israel and countless smaller attacks and skirmishes—and more broadly in Palestine since the eruption of wars, dislocations, and displacements that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948—Batniji’s work here, in Dahmani’s words, “acts as a repository of grief.” His images visualize the compulsive violence and terror from which Gazans have been unable to escape. Blasted by bad connections, these images cannot but appear achingly beautiful, if for no other reason than for how they capture a refusal to die, a refusal to stop calling your mom, a refusal to stop loving and needing and reaching out to friends, relatives, and colleagues. 

And this is to say nothing, yet, of the unconscionable damage that Israel has done to Gaza since October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on Israeli military sites and kibbutzim, killing, among others, some of the most ardent peace activists in Israel. Disruptions begins with a shattering dedication to his family. Batniji lost his mother in 2017. Then, during Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza (funded like all of Israel’s military campaigns by massive amounts of US aid), fifty-two members of Batniji’s family were killed in the month of November alone. His sister was killed, and a few days after that, his brother died for lack of medical care. That Batniji could produce a book under such circumstances is remarkable. That his publisher could direct all of the proceeds from Disruptions to Medical Aid for Palestinians is heartening. That his images could create a language for addressing the cataclysmic violence that we are witnessing from near and far, a language both abstract and evidentiary, is an audacious sign that life persists.

Disruptions was published by Loose Joints in February 2024.