Fathers, 2006
Series of 34 photos, inkjet prints on Hahnemühle paper, each 40 x 60 cm
This project has nothing to do with a direct depiction of living conditions in the oft-mentioned “open-air prison” where over a million Palestinians have been stacked since 1948. Nor has it to do with the conventions of reportage, nor with the clichés produced again and again by the media (the violence, the stone-throwing, the burning tires, the squalor in overpopulated alleys, etc.).
Taysir Batniji’s response to the trite representations of a physical and human space over-specified by the geographical and political situation of the region, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière once described, “does not consist in telling imaginary tales” but “in building a novel relation between appearance and reality, between the visible and its significance, the unique and the common.” Instead of a detailed exposé of the objective forces that keep Gazans penned, and the exasperation, weariness, and despair it yields, he creates a quieter, more subdued interplay between the tensions and oppositions at work under the noise of appearance.
The Fathers series offers an inventory, inevitably incomplete, of the portraits (paintings, chromos, or photographs) that can be seen framed and hung on the walls of cafés, stalls, boutiques, workshops, and other living or working spaces in Gaza as well as in all the Middle East. These portraits, often faded and yellowed, sometimes dusty and askew, rarely depict the present lord and master of the premises, but rather the founder of the establishment, sometimes long since departed. Thus they are the subject par excellence of a special type of “still lives,” since those places are fraught with symbols and traces of human presence(s) and disorder(s) but deprived of their dwellers or patrons; a type of space at the same time full (of goods, objects, memories, and signs of life) and empty; places of the present and the past, hovering, as it were, between different times, memories, and gazes, or petrified, like ruins just after a disaster no one will ever know anything about.
The power of these pictures resides in what they “hold back” as much as in what they reveal. Or, more precisely, in the modest claim they make that there is an inevitable gap between diverging readings and interpretations, here in Gaza, and elsewhere. For the Gazan or the viewer familiar with the region, these “pictures of pictures” evoke a visual culture laden with promiscuous juxtapositions (with and all around the portraits of the Fathers are hung, according to the place, portraits of Arab leaders—Arafat, Saddam—of martyrs—Sheikh Yassin, but also Rachel Corrie—of Mecca, of the Koran); and though the Gazan may not feel concerned by the aesthetic treatment, it will arrest the foreign viewer or the reader of the book. This elusive and irreducible gap between different readings of pictures, otherwise totally modern, raises the question of the conflict between historicities, a question which the notion of globalized art would like us to dispense with.
Catherine David
Deputy Director, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris
