All tagged Taysir Batniji
The 17th Lyon Biennale kicked off at the end of September to great pomp. As guest curator Alexia Fabre announced to a crowd of journalists, this year’s edition is informed by ideas of personal relations, altruism and welcoming the other – vague but not irrelevant topics given how close France came to electing the far-right National Rally Party in July of this year.
Among the most memorable works in the Grandes Locos – a former train-repair depot which serves as the biennial’s main site – is Gözde İlkin’s The Majority of Accent (2018–24), a mixed-media work in which the artist’s characteristic biomorphic figures are painted and embroidered onto the surface of a large textile print of a quarry. The work evokes the venue’s industrial past via images of labour organizing, accompanied by recorded interviews with former workers emitted from speakers hidden in printed, painted and embroidered sacks.
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.
