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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

The survey show positions the works in dialogue with each other, featuring productions and reproductions of Batniji’s work created between 1997 and 2022. During this period, he lived mainly in France, but his life and work continued to meditate on Palestine.

While the exhibition’s title refers to a single work, No Condition Is Permanent (2014-2022), the curatorial narrative and works on display showcase the artist’s diverse practice beginning with photography, painting, drawing, video, installation and performance. Batniji’s prolific production creates a vocabulary that transforms everyday things into rich visual experiences. Most works include biographical elements; reflecting the artist's experience, they also echo the current state of the world. Individual identity and collective endeavours are often tangled, as the artist describes:

In 1997, I wanted to work on ways to master my own language as an artist, and with that I had to specify my position within the historical narrative and reality. This created an intersection and interaction between my personal story and my context as a Palestinian, as an artist, and as a human.

The human condition is embedded in each work, reflecting on the turbulence of displacement, caused by settler violence and colonialism, and the shifting meanings of memory that disrupt familiar images. These works of art are generated by the remains of shared history and trauma, poetically and imaginatively transcending the multiple ongoing crises, challenging reality-politics, and influencing the future by connecting communities. Batniji’s work at times refers to writers and artists such as Mahmoud Darwish, Bernd & Hlilla Becher and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who also address situations of trauma, memory and exclusion. While the history of art is a story of the progress and regression of civilization, Batniji’s work takes the unique individual experience, as its starting point – which is amplified when lived by many.

Impossible Journey, 2002-09

Impossible Journey (2002 –2009), a sand installation in the museum’s atrium, and a video documenting the artist’s action of making the work, offers space to reflect on the exhausting nature of being trapped in an infinite labour of hope. Constricted by invisible boundaries, Batniji shovels a pile of sand from one side to another in a continuous loop. This is the first of a series of works that invite the viewer on an exploration of the human condition.

ID Project, 1993–2020

ID Project (1993–2020) documents the artist’s administrative struggle gaining residency in France as a Palestinian, while reflecting on the idea of displacement and the alienation faced by migrant communities in various places in the world. Despite the reality of their existence as citizens, and as active participants in the societies of their host countries, migrants endure tensions unique to their situation, alongside the constant re-emergence of issues around their identity.

Gaza Walls, 2001

Gaza Walls (2001) presents traces of posters from the Second Intifada (2000–2005), an uprising against Israeli oppression. The work shows layers of fading slogans and faces of martyrs, that were once visible in Gaza’s public space. On the one hand, the erasure of features suggests the erasure of their memory – but on the other, this absence conveys an assertive message of recognition despite the passing of time.

Untitled, 2001–14

This double meaning of absence is also explored by Batniji in Untitled (2001–2014). These silk-screen portraits are made in commemoration of Palestinian martyrs who were killed by Israeli forces during the Second Intifada. The negative image on black, which only becomes visible from certain angles, confronts the fact that the deaths of many remain little spoken of in the media.

Bruit de Fond (Background Noise), 2007

In Bruit de Fond (Background Noise) (2007) the artist presents an oversized video projection of his own face to reflect on the fatal effect of a mechanized settler colonial war. The work was made in response to a published interview with an Israeli air force pilot who was asked by a journalist to speak about the fear created by the sound of falling bombs, which is part of a psychological war. In the video, Batniji resists blinking, but eventually fails as the continued sound of explosions are heard from his Gaza home.

Inflammable, 1997

Inflammable (1997) presents a group of rolled canvases, which have the word ‘INFLAMMABLE’ printed in red on them. The artist created this series after the disappearance of a group of his paintings at Tel-Aviv’s airport while they were in transit from Palestine. The viewer can’t see what is inside, so the message is the artwork rather than the image. The artist turns the loss of his artworks into a statement about their spirit, with the red inscription powerfully evoking the danger of censoring art in war zones.

Absence, 1998

In Absence (1998) the artwork is not dependent on occupying a space. Its traces of tape and stone govern the representation that validates a truth despite the absence of the subject. Here, Batniji uses a direct reference to art systems that are subject to a state between existence and nonexistence. The disappearance of materials here does not necessarily mean an erasure, but rather, a transitory state that is in-between a beginning and an end.

Fathers, 2006

The photographic series Fathers (2006) explores ideas of loss from a social perspective. Presenting images of cafes, barbershops, butcheries and factories, Batniji shows that what connects these places are the framed photographs of the fathers of the shop owners. The work highlights the way family businesses pass down through the generations even when the main protagonists are absent. Here, all the ‘protagonists’ are male, which adds another layer relating to the patriarchal dimension highlighted by the artist, reflecting the structures of public space and everyday life.

Disruption, 2015-17

The museum hallway presents Disruption (2015–2017), where the artist printed screenshots of video calls between the artist and his mother and other family members, highlight how the quality of the call fades as the video connection is disrupted. While in, Wallpaper (Abu Ghraib) (2015), he explores the idea of how events can fade into the background and go unnoticed. As he describes in his own words and intention:

The viewer has the freedom to look closely at the symbols or simply take no notice of them. In both ways, the work casts light on the measure of importance [that is given] to certain news that is perceived from [different] viewpoints and levels of importance.

No Condition Is Permanent, 2014–22

No Condition Is Permanent (2014–2022), which the exhibition borrows its title from, is a fragile work with a strong message, paradoxically conveying both fatalism and hope. The sculpture, showing bars of soap engraved with the title of the work stacked on a pallet, evokes the manufacturing aspect of soap production, raising questions around labour and the systematic action of washing the body, which erases the soap over time, but also holds the possibility of hope by removing the residue of past conditions. Additionally, the act of engraving goes back to past civilizations that depended on writing to carry on stories to the future. These contradictions of writing and cleansing combine aspects of fragility.

Not Lost, 2019-20

Not Lost (2019-2020) consists of a collection of ‘prelevement’ footprints transferred from sidewalks to paper using the ‘frottage’ process. By fixing this collection of traces left behind by people as they cross the urban space, the artist proposes that every human’s step makes an impact, also exploring the notion of progress and its subsequent impact.

Watchtowers, 2008

The photographic series Watchtowers (2008) follows a formal typology approach used by the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher in their works documenting post-industrial architectures. On a closer look, the viewer discovers the reality of the subject that Batniji is highlighting, and the colonial surveillance still continuing today. In this work, the content is more important than the aesthetics; the photos were shot at Israeli checkpoints and sent to Batniji, as the artist could not travel to Palestine in person.

Suspended Time, 2006

Suspended Time (2006) is a representation of the artist himself, embodied as an hourglass, and trying to put time on hold, almost as we see him shifting sand in the Impossible Journey. Batniji puts his works in conversation with one another, as he says:

I built the connection between Impossible Journey which I made first in 2002 in Berlin, and later this work…as if I were on an impossible journey impersonating the role of an hourglass through the moving sand, where I had to pass through a slim passage.

Imperfect Lovers, 2013

Imperfect Lovers (2013) suggests the idea of fragility and the multiple possibilities offered by such a state, by using the Arabic words ‘Thawra/Tharwa’ (revolution/prosperity) with two-opposite meanings in a clock-like shape. The work references Felix Gonzales-Torres’ 1991 work ‘Untitled (Perfect Lovers)’ and Kamal Boulata’s 1978 serigraphy ‘Thawra/Tharwa’. It closes the show by bringing the viewer back to the present, as a reflection on the potential of art and its universal dimensions.

Photo: Ali Al Anssari