Taysir Batniji’s ‘Disruptions’ wins PhotoBook of the Year 2024 – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

On Friday, November 8, organizers announced that Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji had won the 2024 PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards for his Disruptions.

Judges wrote: “Opaque, yet frighteningly urgent, Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions compiles pixelated screenshots from WhatsApp video calls to his family in Gaza, taken between April 2015 and June 2017. The fragmentary aesthetic of fragile phone connections offers a metaphor for the breakdown of the psyche in the midst of daily life compromised by conflict.”

Juror Negar Azimi added: “As Gaza is obliterated in real time, Batniji’s Disruptions is a timely reminder of the precarious nature of human life.”

To mark the award, we re-run a conversation between Batniji and ArabLit contributor Olivia Snaije.

By Olivia Snaije

In January of 2024, the Marseille- and London-based independent publishing house, Loose Joints, which focuses on contemporary photography, will publish a work by Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji.

Loose Joints and Batniji chose to reproduce his work Disruptions, 2015-2017, for the book.  This series of pixelized images disrupted by poor bandwidth taken from WhatsApp conversations with Batniji’s mother and his family in Gaza, “plunge us into a space where family communication is marked by conflict,” as the artist described Disruptions in an exhibition at the MAC VAL Museum. The publication will include text in French, English, and Arabic, written by Taous Dahmani, an art historian, writer and curator specializing in photography. One hundred percent of the profits from Disruptions will go to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, which provides medical care and support on the ground.

Since October 2023, 53 members of Batniji’s immediate family—including his sister Hanan, his cousin Bakr, and their respective families—were killed by Israeli bombs, and his brother Fayez died from lack of medical care. Ten years of Batniji’s earlier artistic works, a large part of which was created during the first Intifada, were also lost in bombings.

Taysir Batniji is from Gaza, but has lived in Paris for years, returning to visit his family whenever possible, which means that years pass without him being able to return. The focus of his work, whether in drawings, paintings, photography, videos, or installations, questions the Palestinian context of occupation, and themes such as disappearance, loss, displacement, and memory through a personal and intimate lens.

Some of his work includes sixty hand carvings on paper from his brother’s wedding album, marking his death two years later when he was killed by an Israeli sniper during first Intifada, in To my Brother, 2012.

A series of photographs, Gaza Diary #3, 1999-2006 / The Border, and the video Transit chronicle Batniji’s attempts to reach Gaza via the Rafah crossing.

GH0809, 2010, is a photographic series with a grim sense of humor, depicting 20 houses destroyed by the Israeli military operation between 2008 and 2009, that Batniji set up as real estate ads describing the location, number of rooms, and amenities.

The following conversation with Taysir Batniji has been edited for length and clarity:

How did this book project come about?

Taysir Batniji: I’ve known Lewis Chaplin, the co-founder of the publishing house, since 2017. He did the graphic design and printing of my book Home Away From Home. [In this book, Batniji explored photographically several branches of his Palestinian family living in the US.]

Loose Joints participated in Paris Photo this year, and Lewis came to see me at my studio with Sarah, his partner, and the co-founder of Loose Joints. That’s when they offered to collaborate on this book, which immediately seemed like a great idea. I had been looking for a way to help Gaza, in a more substantial way than through an individual donation. And more broadly, to raise public awareness via an artistic gesture.

How did you choose Disruptions out of your body of work?

Taysir Batniji: We reviewed a few works and, in the end, all three of us agreed on Disruptions. Like much of my work, but perhaps even more so, this series, made up of around eighty screenshots taken during WhatsApp conversations with my family in Gaza between 2015 and 2017, completely echoes what we are experiencing today. Communication, already difficult at the time, scrambled by poor internet speed and by the drones that constantly crisscross the Gaza skies, depends entirely on—as do water, electricity, and goods entering and leaving the territory—the goodwill of the Israeli authorities. Water and electricity have been cut off since the beginning of October, and telecommunications are restricted, or even, at times, interrupted for several days. In short, the images of Disruptions, unstructured and pixelated, with saturated colors, visually precarious, or “poor,” recall those of war scenes (deaths, houses in ruins, etc.) that we now see on a loop on our television screens or on social networks. The formal fragmentation of these traces of intimate and innocuous images gives them a tragic meaning. We also thought of this work to condemn the ongoing genocide and pay tribute to Gaza, the Palestinian people, and the thousands of dispersed families who can no longer reach each other.

How did you choose Medical Aid for Palestinians as the receiving NGO?

Taysir Batniji: I recommended this NGO because of its real impact in terms of onsite humanitarian aid. This is a major plus today because for the most part NGOs are subordinate to the blockade. I became familiar with MAP during the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014. In cooperation with the Barjeel Art Foundation, the artists Hani Zurob, Steve Sabella, and I each sold a work for a total value of €50,000, which went towards financing an intensive care unit.

Can you briefly describe how, over the years, communication with your family has evolved alongside technology?

Taysir Batniji: I arrived in Europe in 1993-1994, in Naples, Italy, where I lived for almost eight months. At that time, I called my family from a telephone booth, with coins or a prepaid card. When my family needed to contact me, they called my landlord’s number, and he would come get me. I would go to his house and my family would call me back. At the end of 1994, I came to France for a three-month residency, before studying at the National School of Fine Arts in Bourges. I lived on the university campus. I would call from a payphone, and to receive calls it was through the campus switchboard. I remember a loudspeaker in the hallway blaring: “room 250, telephone!”  Beginning in 2000, with cell phones and then smartphones, everything became much simpler. Thanks to prepaid international cards, which were relatively affordable, I could call from my landline or my mobile. There was Viber and Skype, then WhatsApp took over. It really made communication easier. We could talk to each other remotely for free and from anywhere. On the other hand, as I mentioned, Israel’s control of the internet and telephone networks has always impacted the quality of exchanges. Today, we have to make expensive international calls. Even these calls sometimes don’t go through. My family has mostly been in southern Gaza since mid-October, and I struggle to reach everyone. Sometimes we don’t speak to each other for 48 hours or more, which seems like an enormous amount of time when no one is sure of being alive the next day. I try to call family members one after the other, until I find someone. That way, I’m able to check in on everyone.

The effects of Israeli aggression have been a recurrent theme in your life and work. Are you surprised by the scale of what is happening today and is this ghastly violence paralyzing you or are you able to work these days?

Taysir Batniji: I’m not surprised by what’s happening. The intentions of this government, whose members are settlers from the Israeli extreme right, fool no one. What astonishes me is the degree of cruelty and barbarity that characterize the Israeli bombings. The army strikes indiscriminately, causing an unprecedented number of victims (more than 25,000 deaths, 70 percent of them women and children). And this doesn’t include the injured (more than 50,000), the massive destruction of homes, urban spaces, infrastructure… But what shocks me the most, perhaps, even if it’s nothing new, is the degree of complicity of Western governments and the media in these crimes committed by Israel. I can’t understand their passivity in the face of the massacres which we have all witnessed live for 70 days. A child dies every six minutes in Gaza! How, in 2023, can we accept violence of such magnitude, the destruction of hospitals, the aggression against doctors, ambulances, humanitarian workers, or those who require healthcare?  What’s happening is paralyzing and staggering. Especially during the first few weeks, not only did I have to deal with the pain of losing loved ones, but I also worry about the fate of those who remain alive. They are destitute, and at risk of becoming permanent refugees. Yet, I don’t know why or how, I’m still standing. I haven’t let paralysis overcome me. I go to my studio almost every day. I’m trying to work. I am continuing projects I began before the war. I have difficulty concentrating, but I don’t get discouraged. Luckily, some of these projects are “meditative.” The rest of the time, I follow the news, I read newspapers, and I communicate with my family and friends.

You can order a copy of Disruptions here. 100% of the profits will go to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.