All tagged Lili Reynaud Dewar
Lili Reynaud-Dewar had to go to Scotland to learn about France. The artist, born in La Rochelle on the western coast of France in 1975, moved to the UK to study for a masters in fine art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2001. “I didn’t realise until then how male-dominated the French contemporary art word was. There were artists that I admired very much, but there was very little place for women,” she says.
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.
