A phone alert rings in Taysir Batniji’s ears, then another, then another. Photos and videos accumulate, many on Telegram, others from news feeds. He clicks on one and it begins to load, before freezing in a pixelated blur. Slowly, as it clears, bodies emerge. It is one of many.
Batniji is a Palestinian artist from Gaza who lives in Paris. He left Gaza in 1998 and was forbidden from returning after 2006, when the siege on the Strip began. Telegram lets him keep in touch and communicate. Palestinians in Gaza, in turn, send photos, share clips, and document their daily lives living under Israeli bombardment.
Among the images, his eyes remain fixed on a digital threshold, between the image and its clarity, between the crime and its execution, between its uncertain arrival and its inevitable presence. He takes these frozen images and translates them into oil paintings, existing somewhere in-between the images.
Speaking to Al Majalla, Batniji says his drawings are “an attempt to stop what will happen, even metaphorically,” adding, "I kept the news captions that accompanied these photos, just as I received them on Telegram. One of them was about the child Hind Rajab, as her mother recounted the moment of her murder (by the Israeli army)."
These paintings are currently on display at the Sfeir-Zemler Gallery in Beirut, alongside other works by Batniji, as part of his exhibition Without Warning, running until March 29.
Suitcases and crayons
In one corner of the gallery, an open suitcase lies filled with sand on both sides. It revisits an earlier work Batniji created upon leaving Gaza in 1998, where a similar suitcase held sand on just one side. The suitcase is a metaphor. The way Gaza stretches along the sea gives the illusion of vastness, yet it is in fact confined.
He has now lived in exile “a little more than the number of years I lived in Gaza,” he says, and explains that in this suitcase, personal memory merges with the city, with exile, and time that seems suspended in distance. Batniji lost more than 50 members of his extended family since October 2023, 20 of whom were close relatives.
He began painting in February 2023. "I was walking down a street when I came across a large number of wooden crayons and some ballpoint pens. I picked them up and brought them back to my studio. That was just before the war. I started drawing on paper, just as a way to pass time."
He chose to focus on simple things," he says. "In one painting, for example, I thought about the yellow of lemons, the blue of the sky with clouds. Then the war began. With the first explosions, it became impossible to think about form. It was like I was in one world, and my work in another. I was torn, constantly shifting between following the news and trying to reach my family."
Colours and clarity
Abandoning form altogether gave rise to Homeless Colours—a series of monochrome paintings. Each piece became a pure, unbroken field of colour—a direct response to the overwhelming flood of massacre images. There are no human figures, no discernible shapes, only layered hues, as if the artist were meditating, in a vain search for clarity.
"What happened is beyond description and imagination," he says, appearing unsettled, confusing dates and works. "I feel distracted, lost." His works at Sfeir-Zemler appear simple in form, elements, and execution, but carry deep layers of meaning and history, dating back to when they were just an idea.
In those long months of absolute devastation, Batniji did not seek to render murder as an image but rather to counterbalance destruction through colour, not with the graphic violence of red but with the more restrained hues of blue and yellow.
In one piece, he applies a layer of yellow, then embarks on a repetitive, sequential process, layering colour until the pen runs dry. The act seems compulsive. "I draw with appetite, without seeking value, without satisfaction, trying to regain focus, to escape the overwhelming flood of images," he says. "This shapelessness is silence through colour. The painting ends when the pen is empty."
Refugees' keys
Elsewhere, a collection of photographs of keys is displayed. Keys are a recurring motif in his work, and in March 2024, Batniji contacted Samah al-Jazzar, a young woman working with refugees in central and southern Gaza, asking her to photograph the refugees' keys against a plain white background.
Initially, she hesitated to ask for details of the keys' owners, so the first images carry no identifying information. "Then she found the courage to write down the owner's name and a few details about them," Batniji recalls. "That was important." Now, there are 250 photos of keys belonging to people who either died or who are living in dire conditions.
Each key is accompanied by a small personal token, whether it be a medallion with a Hamsa hand, or a red heart, or a Mickey Mouse charm. "Each of them had keys, just like anyone else. They had normal lives. And then, suddenly, it was all gone." On the repeated use of keys in his art, he says: "Repetition here is tied to a history that has been repeating itself, in different forms, since 1948."
"When I realised in 2006 that I could no longer return to Gaza, I still had my keys with me. They became a symbol of asylum, exile, departure, loss. A door to a place that no longer exists. I used them because they were familiar to me, and at that moment, I needed something familiar in order to create."
A wider history
The exhibition also includes pre-war works, such as Fading Roses—a series of 12 paintings where roses blur into what could be either petals or bloodstains. Another collection, called Out of the Blue, explores the accidental loss of images.
"Sometimes, when I take my phone out of my pocket, it accidentally captures a photo. Most of these images are abstract—only in rare cases do they hint at a human form. I took these unintended shots and translated them into 16 pastel paintings, rubbing the pigment over and over, until the colour was gone."
Over the past year, some platforms have seen Batniji's older works circulated and shared, among them Fathers—a photography series of fathers and grandfathers, capturing images in Gaza's cafés, grocery stores, and shops. Recalling where he took these photos, he says: "The café on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, it no longer exists. The oldest pharmacy in Gaza, its owner was killed.."
In Gaza, places are often known by the names of the families that founded them, and when an elderly family member retires or dies, their portrait is placed on the wall as a way of preserving their presence. "This is how they deal with loss," Batniji says. "The father remains present even after he has left. It's a reminder that an individual's story in Gaza is always part of a larger collective history, existing in a space between the private and the public."
Inside each of these images, there is another image, he says. "The surroundings are captured along with the father's portrait—electric wires, other iconic pictures of Yasser Arafat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Rachel Corrie, and political posters... People are surprised to learn that these images are not new—that the war on Gaza didn't begin on 7 October. Far from it."
