In the work of Taysir Batniji—a Palestinian artist born in Gaza shortly before the 1967 war and Israeli occupatio—impermanence and wandering, chosen or forced, experienced alone or in company, are a prerequisite of liberty. To the comfort and stability of home (sweet home), Taysir Batniji, developing an oeuvre in perpetual mutation, opposes the mobile home. Hence the central project of his Arles exhibition, Home Away From Home, produced in 2017 as part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission, a program to support contemporary photography initiated by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès together with the Aperture Foundation. The artist chose to live as closely as possible with his Palestinian cousins who had emigrated to the United States, in order to capture the temporal and spatial discontinuity, the points of both rupture and fusion between a given identity, stripped away even as it is embraced, and a reconstituted identity. This American project will be presented in parallel with a selected retrospective of photographs produced between 1999 and 2010.
Sophie Jaulmes