Au cas où #2
Taysir Batniji

With Au cas où #2, Taysir Batniji continues a deeply moving exploration of loss, exile, and the fragility of home in the face of geopolitical violence. Composed of 90 photographs (five rows of eighteen images) of keys accompanied by handwritten accounts, the work presents ordinary objects that have become the last remnants of homes destroyed during Israeli bombardments in Gaza. The key—a recurring motif in the artist’s practice—functions here as a paradoxical symbol: the promise of a return that has become impossible, a material trace of a vanished space, a silent testimony to a life suspended. Each image, paired with a precise biographical fragment—name, place, date of destruction, forceddisplacement—anchors the work in a painful temporality where the intimate intersects with history.

By documenting these memory-laden domestic objects, Taysir Batniji does more than freeze catastrophe: he constructs a sensitive archive of dispossession, making visible the individual narratives that political and media discourses tend to dissolve into the abstraction of numbers. The artistic gesture thus becomes an act of resistance, a space where dignity persists despite annihilation.

Presented within the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography, Au cas où #2 interrogates vulnerability as a political condition, but also as a site of memory and care. Between image and text, disappearance and persistence, the work opens a space for reflection and awareness, reminding us that behind every destruction lies a story, a home, a life displaced.

In collaboration with Sfeir-Semler Gallery

© Taysir Batniji and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg

Year of production: 2024