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


His work, which includes a diverse range of photographic projects, sculpture and conceptual installations, engages his liminal political situation in highly varied and deeply poetic ways. As the title of this exhibition suggests, Batniji’s work mines the interplay between constant migration and endless stasis, the perpetual instability and simultaneous paralysis that marks his political and personal experience.

In GH0809, Batniji has 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 – in serene, still lighting, empty of people – the artist has created real-estate advertisements. The plain language of these advertisements creates a fiction that temporarily suspends the political context of these homes and imagines them purely material real-estate. The images transport an almost unthinkable sense of tranquility, beauty 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 funny and also profoundly complex, 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