What to See in Paris During FIAC
Taysir Batniji, 'Quelques bribes arrachées au vide qui se creuse' (A Few Snatches Torn from the Widening Void), 2021, installation view, MAC VAL, Paris. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Éric Dupont, Paris; photograph: © Aurélien Mole
Taysir Batniji
MAC VAL
19 May 2021 – 9 January 2022
The conceptual work of Palestinian-French artist Taysir Batniji retraces his bureaucracy-filled journey from the Gaza Strip to Paris, exploring themes of displacement, erasure and loss. In the video installation Background Noise (2007), currently on view at MAC VAL, the artist films himself during an air-raid. Staring stoically into the camera as the walls around him shake from the force of nearby explosions, Batniji offers a glimpse of the untenability of daily life for Palestinians. Alongside this piece is another of the exhibition’s most moving works, the series ‘To my Brother’ (2012), which consists of 60 incisions into paper that trace the contours of photographs taken at the artist’s brother’s wedding. The drawings offer up ghostly likenesses of Batniji’s family and sibling, who was felled by an Israeli sniper’s bullet during the first Intifada in 1987, which, from a certain distance, begin to disappear like faded memories.
