Taysir Batniji is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores themes of displacement, impermanence, fragility, memory and the politics of visibility. Born in Gaza, Batniji has lived and worked between Palestine and France since the 1990s. His work spans photography, drawing, painting, video, installation and performance. Batniji’s artwork is marked by a poetic restraint and conceptual precision. Rather than presenting overt political statements, he turns to the everyday, the overlooked and the ephemeral to reflect on the effects of loss, and fragmentation. Drawing from his personal history, collective memory and broader historical narratives, he approaches his subjects with a sense of poetic detachment– distorting, displacing and reimagining them to offer layered and critical reflections on lived reality.

Batniji presents a selection of works is centered on the motif of keys –, objects he has explored from the 1990s as powerful metaphors for dispossession and displacement. These works evoke the immobiliszation Palestinians face in their daily lives, and the inability to control or shape space and time. Homeless Colors is a series he created using found crayons, ballpoint pens, and felt-tip markers. In these drawings, the artist engages in a meditative, almost spiritual process, an intimate retreat from the harsh realities that surround him. Conceived during a time of profound shock in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the series reflects a state of collective and personal grief, a silence born of trauma that leaves no room for words.

we refuse_d is produced by Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, on the occasion of their 15th anniversary, and presented in partnership with M HKA.
Curated by Nadia Radwan and Vasıf Kortun.