To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to make something survive: to tear a few precise fragments from the void that is widening, to leave, somewhere, a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs
— Georges Perec, Espèces d'espaces, Paris, Galilée, 1974
The MAC VAL organizes the first museum monographic exhibition of Taysir Batniji. Covering nearly twenty-five years of creations, this exhibition proposes to bring together a few snippets of this abundant work and to unravel its multiple threads. Best known for his photographic activity, Taysir Batniji practices a humble and protean art on a human scale.
Taysir Batniji rapidly evolved his pictorial practice from the beginnings towards more conceptual objects, photography and video. Conceptual and nevertheless intimate objects slowly impose themselves. Favouring no one medium, he makes the cultural and geographical in-between that he has inherited perceptible, navigating between the Middle East and the West, the intimate sphere and the public space, the poetic zone and the political territory. Each of these assembled stones allows Taysir Batniji a moving definition of his own identity, the affirmation of his existence in the world against all odds.
As if the best way to evoke the world's disasters could only be done in the light of oneself, of one's own situation. As if he were constantly giving proof of his existence. To better resist. Taysir Batniji's work focuses on the trace, the memory of a form, a gesture, the memory of a crossing, the absence of a loved one, the deprivation of a land, the disappearance of an image... In permanent dialogue with the history of art, situated, his works are taken up and respond to each other through time.
The exhibition assembles paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, performances (from 1997 to 2021) into a vast self-portrait. It proposes a reflection in action around identity. Paraphrasing Georges Perec, the title of the exhibition takes us into a melancholic space where tearing away and displacement are the driving forces.
watercolor on paper, 35.7 × 27.7 cm, each
oil on paper and adhesive tape on a wall (missing work), inkjet print on paper, 65.6 × 99.3 cm, original work: 49 × 78.5 cm
series of approximately 30 drawings framed, watercolour and pencil on paper, various dimensions
series of 26 drawings, pencil and colour pencil on paper, framed, 20.9 × 28.1 cm, each
C-print, 40 × 60 cm, each
suitcase, sand, 42 × 58 × 68 cm
poster, adhesive tape, glass, wood, 129 × 56 × 10 cm, unique
sand, glass, 7.5 × 28 × 10 cm
set of 12 black-and-white photographs, digital prints, 50 × 40 cm, each
diptych, acrylic on canvas, site specific, 210 × 120 cm, each
20 C-prints on glossy transluscent paper, 29.7 × 21 cm, each
series of 102 drawings/ rubbings, charcoal and graphite on Arches Johannot paper, 35.5 × 28 cm, each
diptych: colour photograph, inkjet print on paper, formica table, 40 × 70 cm, formica table: 70 × 85 cm
Photo: Aurélien Mole