Image:
Taysir Batniji presents his performance titled Just as a Precaution at March Meeting. Sharjah Art Foundation, 2024. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid
Overview
Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji reactivates Just as a Precaution, a participatory work he created as part of the instructive art project do it بالعربي [in Arabic] in 2015. The artist will introduce his practice and provide audience members with instructions to make photocopies of their keychains. Each ensuing two-dimensional image will then be pinned on a wall, until the entire surface is covered.
This gesture can be thought of as an act of intentionally leaving a trace of one's passage in the here and now, a bit of one’s ‘home', or oneself, ‘elsewhere’. The act may recall certain imposed practices of security control, whereby visitors are often ‘recorded’.
The work intends to speak to the present moment, when nearly two million Palestinian people in Gaza have been displaced since the beginning of the Israeli offensive on 7 October 2023, obliterating and erasing more than half of the city’s infrastructure.