Taysir Batniji
GH0809 (n°7), 2009

Installation view: Atopia. Migration, Heritage and Placelessness Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Museo de Arte Moderno Bogota, Colombia, 2016
© Bildrecht, Vienna, (2017) | Photo: Sebastián Cruz Roldán & Santiago Pinol

Courtesy of the Artist

Taysir Batniji

Collection

Atopia

4 Lamda-prints on paper between plexiglass
29.5 x 21 cm each

Taysir Batniji’s work, which includes a diverse range of photographic projects, sculpture and conceptual installations, engages his personal liminal political situation as Palestinian in highly controversial and at times deeply poetic ways. As the title of this exhibition suggests, Batniji’s work mines the interplay between permanent migration and unbroken stasis, the dystopic reality and the fantasy of Palestinian statehood, and the perpetual instability and simultaneous paralysis that marks his political and personal experience.

For GH0809, Batniji imagined a real-estate company offering homes in Gaza. As he is not permitted to return, Batniji worked for nearly two years with a Palestinian photographer to take precise images of houses damaged during the 2008-2009 war in Gaza. With these images, which can be considered as “forensic sites” – taken in serene, still lighting, empty of people – the artist created his fake real-estate advertisements. The plain language of these advertisements generates a fiction that temporarily suspends the political context of these homes and imagines them purely as material real-estate. The images transport an almost unthinkable sense of tranquility, normality and possibility in a devastated place, weaving together the tenuous irony, poetry and political reality of Batniji’s Gaza. It is a fantasy, at once humorous and profoundly inconceivable and disturbing, that a home in Gaza might ever be available as “4 rooms, 2 sitting rooms 2 bathrooms with garden and sea views.”

*1966 in Gaza, Palestine I Living and working in France and Palestine

Artist's website

http://www.taysirbatniji.com

RELATED PROGRAM

Video: Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness

Taysir Batniji
GH0809 (n°25), 2009

Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness
August 10–September 29, 2016 | Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador

Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness | March 1–May 29, 2016 | MamBo, Bogota, Colombia

Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness May 14–October 5, 2014 | MAZ, Guadalajara, Mexico

Artists

Taysir Batniji

Taysir BatnijiGH0809 (n°7), 2009

Taysir Batniji
GH0809 (n°7), 2009