Ensemble

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.
For many years, he has been unable to return to Gaza, a rupture that underscores much of his production. Distance, silence, and absence are not merely themes but materials that shape his practice. Through subtle, resonant gestures, he creates contemplative spaces that speak to the precariousness of place, identity, and belonging in a fractured world.
Batniji presents a selection of works centered on the motif of keys, objects he has explored from the 1990s as powerful metaphors for dispossession and displacement. These works evoke the immobilization Palestinians face in their daily lives, and the inability to control or shape space and time. He also presents Homeless Colors, a series 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 Vasif Kortun.