Taysir Batniji – ID Project, 1993–2020

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.

The work ID Project retraces the artist’s bureaucratic history until he became a naturalised French citizen. Through sixteen facsimiles of his identity documents, it recounts Taysir Batniji’s administrative progress from the moment he noticed, during a trip in 1993, that his nationality was classed as “undefined” in the relevant box on the pass issued to him by the Israeli military authorities. It happened at Rome airport, while he was waiting in the passport control queue. The anecdote reflects a continual reminder, and it is symbolised by the expression, carved in stone, of an “undefined” identity