Taysir Batniji

Venue

Museum of Contemporary Art of Lyon (macLyon)

Lyon

Born in 1966 à Gaza, Palestine
Lives and works in Paris, France

Taysir Batniji’s work draws as much on the artist’s personal memories as on the turbulence of history and the present. His multidisciplinary practice — drawing, installation, sculpture, performance, photography and video — has a metaphorical, poetic dimension. Through his exploration of the private and the public spheres, of displacement and obstruction, memory and disappearance, Taysir Batniji presents a shifting definition of his own identity, which has been shaped geographically and culturally by both the Middle East and the West.

Based on hundreds of accounts of people forced to leave their homes in Gaza, which had been demolished by Israeli bombardments in recent months, Au cas où #2 explores feelings of loss and exile using the motif of a key, a symbol which recurs in various different forms in Taysir Batniji’s work. This work is a combination of text and image and reveals the stories that lie behind photographs of domestic objects. The artwork logs the dates of the bombings and people’s relocations, poignantly evoking the themes of forced homelessness and displacement.