Review of Disruptions by Taysir Batniji
Taysir Batniji is a Palestinian artist based in Paris. A few months ago, I was visiting Paris for a work trip for Afield. I went to a bookshop at Yvon Lambert Gallery and asked the manager if there is any book by or about Palestinian artists. He recommended the book Disruptions, published by Loose Joint Press, which was the last one in stock. I picked it up immediately after noticing the price was 40 euros, 100% of which will go to the NGO Medical Aid Palestine.
I’ve carried the book from Paris to Denver, to Detroit and now to Seoul. Tomorrow, I have a chance to present to a private audience in Seoul. Here’s my note for the 10 minutes speech.
To put this work, a book by a Palestinian artist calling his mother in Palestine, the frozen screen glitch and the terror they hold, into perspective, I must at least try to contextualize the current crisis in the lines of history. What’s happening in the land of Palestine, occupied by the state of Israel is a continuation and the product of the western colonialism — specifically the British Empire, and the European racism against the Jewish people, which lead to mass migration and making of Zionism. While we must hold accountable the state of Israel, and those in support of settler colonialism, we also need to understand the historical context that continues to legitimize their colonialism. When speaking about the current conflict (genocide) in the land of Palestine, I make a point of saying I do not tolerate anti-semitism in my life, thinking, teaching and organizing. Anti-semitism is one of the root causes of the current crisis(genocide). In a lot of ways, the oppression of Palestinian people is related to the oppression of Jewish people in the last century. The current crisis — and the ways in which a group who were formerly oppressed have turned to become oppressor — is a cycle of tragic repetition, one which we must use our rights and powers to break.
How is this war different from any other war? To compare this war in the context of more recent wars, the United States Invasion of Iraq (151,000 violent deaths between March 2003 to June 2006 according to the Iraq Health and Family Survey) and Afganistan(46,319 civilian deaths between 2001–2021 according to the Cost of War project at the Brown University). Death counts during the war are difficult to grasp accurately for logistical reasons. Regardless of the specific metrics, it’s undeniable that the death of around 40,000 Palestinians since October 7th of 2023 is a paramount of innocent deaths in modern history. — source
The tragedy, once again is cyclic. The death of Jews during the World War II counts around 6 million. The current death of 40,000 Palestinians are roughly 0.67% of the Holocaust. I admit this comparison is not unethical. No one person’s death should be amounted against another person’s death. Yet, all wars are unethical. I speak of the numbers of relative number of deaths to make sense of the gravity of all innocent lives, and the historical responsibilities we have as citizens of the Global North to be accountable for contemporary wars, both the Holocaust and the genocide in Palestine. I am a Korean American, whose cultural and political roots are grounded in two countries heavily invested in the ongoing warfare, as someone with privilege to academia and cultural institutions, whose responsibilities shall not be forgotten by the mere distance of the genocide. Here, I want to share an artist book that allowed me to see humanity through the distances and complexities of the war.
Disruptions is a book of glitchy photographs, captured by Batniji while calling his mother on WhatsApp. In an essay accompanied in the book, Taous Dahmani writes in ‘On What Subsists and What Persists’ —
“Imagine a son in Paris, a mother in Gaza, and a digital space bringing them together. Suddenly the weather turns stormy, or foggy. The connection falls, the mother disappears on the frozen screen. Imagine: “Can you still hear me? Are you still there?” Time is interrupted, the distance between them becomes tangible. Inspired by his love for conceptual protocols, Batniji systematically captures these glitches, for their absurdity as much as their symbolism.”
I am sure most people have experienced some type of glitch in their lives. Calling their family abroad, trying to communicate important message on Zoom when the electricity or WiFi goes out. The moments of glitch are reminders that the Internet is indeed physical infrastructure of connected cables and servers, that are prone to the climate and warfare. The moments of glitch also leave us in the state of waiting, null between two way traffic of information packets. The Emptiness can be jarring, as we find our own reflections on the smartphone or laptop screens. What do you do when you loose connection? For Batniji, it was a moment of archiving the lost connections. The act of archiving seems to be only thing one can do, in the face of automated warfare and mass destruction of livelihood. The ingenuity of this project lays on both the systems of archiving, ranging from green screens to more colorful ones, the variety of intimate lives captured: kitchen, living room, portraits, cityscapes in low-resolution images.
“Glitches are errors, defects that shatter the quality of an image. The pixelated screenshots engage our mental images of what war does: images of destruction, the ruins left by combat zones, the elimination of persons, and disappeared loved ones… The aesthetic of the glitch is a metaphor for all forms of division, separation and borders.”
Sharing Batniji’s work in South Korea, another country under unending warfare, brings forth a specific type of divisions and complexities. I have a storage for my art work in the far north of Paju, in an industrial warehouse a few kilometers away from the North Korea. On some rainy days, I can hear North Korean propaganda radio picked up in my car’s stereo. I once read about the electromagentic shield (disturbance) built by South Korean government, that blocks radio signals coming from the North, and the shield on the other end that block radio and telecommunication from the South. I am not sure if rain, storm or humidity have something to do with the radio signals bypassing the disturbance. The experience of hearing glitchy propaganda from North Korea materialized the division and ongoing warfare viscerally. The borders of modern warfare are not always visible. The war may appear to be invisible(non-happening) despite being physically near the site of division. It’s especially jarring to find myself reading about the death tolls of Palestine in a luxurious cafe in Paju. This kind of disconnect and dissonance maybe similar to the life of ordinary Israeli, or Europeans who only experience the terror in Palestine via social media and news images. The hyper realistic images from news agencies and AI-generated viral Instagram images of ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ are over-stimulating. These sensational images do not bring the sense of intimacy and immediacy as Batniji’s glitchy images of his mother.
I end my talk with another quote by Dahmani.
“Photography’s (absurd) quest to “tell the truth” might actually lie in fables, not realism. The abstract value of the glitch establishes a new type of document: evidence of the instability that rules over the Palestinan People, and othe survival of images, in spite of all.”
In these glitchy images, I find both the terror and intimacy, two things that are always intertwined. I do not find hope or ‘possibilities of intervention’ in this glitch. Within the intimacy, it is the humanity of the subjects in photographs, and the artist’s archival processes to bring peace to them.
