All tagged In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc
After a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19, the Foire Internationale de l’Art Contemporain (FIAC), France’s premier art fair, has come roaring back. On a cool autumn day, swarms of masked visitors descended upon the Grand Palais Éphémère (GPÉ), a temporary structure of the same dimensions and footprint as the 19th-century Grand Palais (which is usually the site of the fair, but is currently undergoing renovation). Elsewhere in the French capital, satellite fairs Asia Now and Paris Internationale are back in action, too.
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.
