Taysir Batniji: Gaza to America – Home Away From Home

When Taysir Batniji left his home in Gaza City in 1993, he was only able to do so thanks to a laissez-passer issued by the Israeli authorities. Valid for one year, the travel document provided the then 25-year-old with the permission he needed to travel to the Italian city of Naples, where Batniji hoped to build on the studies he had already completed in the West Bank and to continue his education and progression as an artist.

The laissez-passer included all the details one might expect from a passport: a photograph and sections relating to the bearer’s name, sex, date and place of birth, the document’s date of issue and the issuing authority.

But when it came to the section entitled nationality, the laissez-passer described Batniji as neither Palestinian nor Israeli but simply as “undefined”.

Batniji eventually realised his dream of becoming an artist not in Naples but in Paris, where he has lived since 1996, the only member of his immediate family to have left the Gaza Strip.

In the intervening years, he has built a reputation as a nuanced chronicler of Gaza, where he returned to regularly and often until 2012, and of states of exile, displacement and what he describes as the cultural and geographical “between-ness” that now increasingly defines the lives of migrants the world over, Palestinian or otherwise.

Even though it is 25 years out-of-date, Batniji still retains his laissez-passer as a reminder of his journey to the West, which is just one of the many things he shares in common with his cousins Kamal, Khadra, Sobhi, Ahmed, Samir, and Akram who are the subjects of his latest exhibition, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

Gaza to America was produced in 2017 as part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission, a program initiated by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermes together with the New York-based Aperture Foundation.

In it, Batniji retraces the journeys made by his cousins who decided to leave Gaza and who now have extended families of their own in California and Florida.

Their stories are captured in 143 works that include photographs, video portraits and interviews, drawings, old family photographs and objects such as passports that investigate the intimate functioning of this familial diaspora and the practices that define their identities as cousins, Gazans, Palestinians and Arab expats but also, increasingly as Americans.

“I do not pretend to reveal the lives of my American cousins in their entirety, in all their complexities, nor to present an exhaustive statement on the Arab and Palestinian diaspora in the United States,” Batniji writes in his introduction to the book that accompanies Gaza to America: Home Away From Home.

“These works are instead my impressions, born of these encounters, varying in their intensity, according to the context, place, and degree of interaction with these members of my family.”

The title of the work comes from a conversation that Taysir Batniji had with his cousin, Khadra, who in response to the question “Do you feel at home in America?” answered: “My original home is Palestine. But this is a home away from home. Yes, like home.”

What follows is the result of two visits the Palestinian artist made to his cousins in California and Florida, the first of which lasted for three weeks and the second a-month-and-a-half, during which time he had to stay with family members, some of whom he had not seen since he was a child.

“What was strange in this experience was that tradition dictated that I had to stay with the family. There was no question that I would stay in a hotel or rent another house,” Batniji explains, speaking from Paris.

“I knew them, we share family ties, but at the same time, they were strangers to me and there were many things about their family lives that I didn’t know about and had to learn through conversations and interviews.

“It took time for us to become familiar, but through all this time I spent with them, there were always comparisons between me and them, so for me it was a kind of mirror.”

Accompanied by a monographic survey of Batniji’s work which spans the years 1999 to 2012, Gaza to America is one of five exhibitions that form the America Great Again! stand at the 49th edition of the world’s most famous and best-loved photography festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles.

America Great Again! includes some of modern and contemporary photography’s biggest beasts including Robert Frank, Raymond Depardon and Paul Graham, each of whom offer a foreigner’s perspective on modern and contemporary America, and each of whose exhibitions have been allotted serious real estate in the centre of Arles.

In contrast, Batniji’s work is currently being exhibited on two floors of the austere Chapelle Saint-Martin du Mejan, a 17th-century Baroque chapel that sits not far from the banks of the River Rhone.

While Gaza to America occupies the ground floor, the monographic survey of Batniji’s work occupies the first, including series such as the Bernd and Hilla Becher-inspired Watchtowers (2008) and Fathers (2006), which consists of photographs of commemorative portraits that hang in shops and workplaces across Gaza and Gaza Diary #3 (1999-2006).

Initially taken during visits to Gaza as nothing more than a private and personal record, the images that comprise Gaza Diary were first exhibited by the artist in 2008.

“What’s important about Gaza Diary is that I never thought they would be exhibited as an art piece. I was documenting my life in a diary during each period I spent in Gaza, long or short. Until 2008 when the Municipality of Paris commissioned me and another artist, Rula Halawani, to show daily life in Palestine,” he explains.

“At that time, and still unfortunately, it was impossible for me to go to Gaza, but I told them that I had hundreds of photographs that I took, and all of them were about daily life and it was only then that I started to think of these pictures as things that might be shown as artworks.”

As more time has passed, however, Batniji’s Gaza photographs have become like his laissez-passer, objects whose resonance is only increased by absence and loss.

“The more the prospect of a return grows distant, the more the photos are of tremendous importance to me,” he writes. “They are my memory.”

Taysir Batniji, Gaza to America: Home Away From Home runs at Arles 2018 Les Rencontres de la Photographie until September 23, 2018. Visit www.rencontres-arles.com for details

 

Photography: Laura El-Tantawy – Beyond Here is Nothing, GPP Dubai

“Enclosed between four walls, the sound of silence never seemed louder. It’s claustrophobic. I wait for the phone to ring, check for emails obsessively, eat everything out of the fridge. The hunger remains. I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing. The awareness I am experiencing is unspeakable. Faces change when we meet. Is their solitude reflected in mine? There is an awkward silence. In it, a minute feels like an hour. An hour a day. A day can be a lifetime.”

Laura El-Tantawy, Beyond Here is Nothing

A disembodied shadow caught on a foliage-etched wall, birds in flight over the blurred silhouettes – or are they shadows – of Casuarina trees and vibrating date palms and a young man’s head wreathed in billows of greasy-looking smoke are just some of the oneiric images that comprise Egyptian photographer Laura El-Tantawy’s latest project, Beyond Here Is Nothing.

Featuring sometimes experimental photographs that have captured on her mobile phone, Beyond Here Is Nothing represents the second chapter in El-Tanawy’s ongoing journey of self-exploration, an investigation of her fractured sense of identity and her unfulfilled quest for a place she can call home.

Born in the UK to Egyptian parents, El-Tantawy lived in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the US before she moved back to Egypt in 2007 with the aim of finally settling down.

Living and working there throughout the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, the artistic result of El-Tantawy’s journey was the body work that became In The Shadow of the Pyramids (2015), a book that won the photographer numerous awards and set both her career and her life on its current path

A personal journey made over the course of six tumultuous years, In the Shadow of the Pyramids offered an emotionally charged and profoundly personal take on the 2011 Egyptian revolution as well as a lyrical meditation on notions of identity, both personal and national.

The product of the photographer’s attempt to turn the country of her childhood dreams and family holidays into her adult home, In The Shadow of the Pyramids resulted in a significant psychological and emotional toll which unfolds, obliquely, throughout Beyond Here Is Nothing.

“I was always looking for Egypt as a home. A place to live in, to have a family in, to take root. All of the things that you to attach to the idea of home,” El-Tantawy explains, speaking from London, her base for much of the last decade.

“But I hadn’t spent any time there as an adult. I only knew it from the very innocent perspective of a child,” she admits.

“After seeing the revolution and how it culminated, all the people that died and the lives that changed, I realised that Egypt wasn’t a place where I wanted to live.”

In letting go of the idea of Egypt as anything other than a poetic, ancestral and emotional home El-Tantawy feared that she was letting go of her identity.

“Can I still say I am Egyptian with a sense of confidence,” she offers, “if I don’t live there?”.

Even before In The Shadow of the Pyramids, El-Tantawy had already experienced the same confusing mixture of cosmopolitanism, loneliness and dislocation that defines the earlier years of so many third culture individuals, children who are raised in a culture other than their parents’.

“It’s certainly not unique to me, but I feel that growing up between two very different cultures and constantly trying to navigate between them comes at a certain emotional weight that you carry with you,” the photographer explains.

“The friction between the cultures seeps into relationships, into communication, into language. I sometimes think in Arabic but I speak in English and it doesn’t really make much sense,” she says.

“Eventually you feel pushed away emotionally from the places where you spend most of your time. How do you wake up from that? I feel like the camera became a tool that allowed me to reflect on that.”

Beyond Here Is Nothing is full of such reflections as well as vignettes of ungraspable moments. Full of shadows, double exposures, blurred outlines and spectral silhouettes, a melancholy portrait of restless rootlessness that is neatly summed up by El-Tantawy’s haunting description of her own sense of loneliness.

“Enclosed between four walls, the sound of silence never seemed louder. It’s claustrophobic. I wait for the phone to ring, check for emails obsessively, eat everything out of the fridge. The hunger remains,” she writes.

“I feel like if I dig my hand deep into my soul, I will find nothing. The awareness I am experiencing is unspeakable. Faces change when we meet. Is their solitude reflected in mine? There is an awkward silence.”

Simultaneously open to interpretation and opaque, universal and specific, Beyond Here Is Nothing explores similar territory to that mined by the self-taught Franco-Algerian photographer Bruno Boudjelal.

Photographic journeys through identity’s shadowy hinterlands, they question profoundly cherished notions identity while encouraging viewers to explore and confront their own.

This article originally appeared in Portfolio – Alserkal Avenue

Art: Howard Hodgkin – a very private collector

Sotheby’s auction offers an unprecedented insight into the life and passions of the late Howard Hodgkin, a famously private artist.

On Tuesday, Sotheby’s will host an auction in London that will afford visitors and bidders a glimpse into the very private and intimate world of one the greatest artists of the late 20th century.

Hodkin’s living room in Bloomsbury included wall hung 19th century Persian carpets, a 16th century Spanish statue of a saint, a brass 16/17th century brass pilgrim flask, from the Deccan, India, a bust of King George II (1683-1760) by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack, (c.1739), 18th century relief panels with Allegories, Britain, 18th century, a mirror from the manor of John Vardy (c.1740), a bust of King Louis XIV (c. 1700-15) and a 19th century Venetian armchair. Sotheby’s

Howard Hodgkin died on March 9 at the age of 84, and like Henri Matisse, Yves Saint Laurent and Sol LeWitt before him, he not only left behind a vast body of work, but also a profoundly personal cabinet of curiosities that attests to his status as one of the great artist-collectors, a passionate connoisseur whose possessions reflected his interests, as well as served as his inspiration and muse. “There are moments in people’s lives when the desire to possess works of art takes possession of them, and that is of course where – as an almost registered sufferer – I know all about it,” the painter admitted in the 1980s.

A contemporary of David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Blake and John Hoyland, Hodgkin came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s – he shared his first show with Jones at London’s ICA Gallery in 1962 – but by the time he had his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1976, Hodgkin was better known in the art world as a collector than as a painter.

As a child, Hodgkin had grown up surrounded by objects, thanks to the prodigious collection formed by his great-grandparents. An account of the eclectic acquisitions and assemblages of largely English antiques was published by John Eliot Hodgkin in 1900, in three volumes called Rariora, listing “things wondrous, rare and strange”.

In the 1970s, Hodgkin supplemented his income as an artist and art teacher by trading in antiques, especially frames. As a lifelong pedestrian, he would often hitchhike around the country in pursuit of rare examples.

It was a quest that continued throughout Hodgkin’s life. Frames came to play a significant role in his paintings, which were always executed on wood and boards, never on canvas. When he travelled, he would often look for frames to take home with him, incorporating them in paintings of the place or trip from which they originated. Despite this, and his lifelong love of objects associated with South India and Central Asia – Hodgkin first visited India in 1964 and then returned almost annually – his approach to collecting was emphatically not one of a traveller in search of souvenirs.

From left: Bust of a female courtier, French, late 19th/early 20th century and a large bowl from the Deccan, India, circa 1900. Sotheby’s

“I particularly don’t like objects of sentiment: people who have things not because they like and admire them, but because they have associations. You should have what you want, what you like, around you,” the painter told World of Interiors’s Mirabel Cecil in 1989. “Things have to be acquired out of necessity, as well as passion.”

Those passions were evident from the items Hodgkin assembled in his central London home, a modest-looking house in Bloomsbury where the painter lived for more than 30 years, and from the outside offered no clues of the treasures contained within: French Aubusson tapestries and rare carpets from Khorasan, Indian miniatures, Ottoman candlesticks, relief panels and his particular passion, tiles.

It was Hodgkin’s art master at Eton, Wilfrid Blunt – the art historian Anthony Blunt’s brother – who first introduced him to non-western art and who inspired him to collect his first examples of Indian painting, which became the focus of Hodgkin’s passion.

“I think of collecting as a sort of virus really, and I was infected … It is an addiction,” said the painter, who was known to keep auction catalogues and a tape measure by his bedside, ready in case a potential new acquisition might delight and capture his eye.

“‘It’s all grist to the mill,’ Howard insisted … he collected in order to create new work. What he acquired fed into his work,” Hodgkin’s partner, Antony Peattie, explains in the 351-page catalogue that accompanies Sotheby’s 453-lot sale.

Much of that work was executed in the studio that was connected to Hodgkin’s house, but whose appearance could not have been more different. Whereas the building’s domestic interiors were festooned with objects and finished in colours such as a particular shade of pale blue-green, which Hodgkin referred to as “Indian vernacular”, his studio was a classic example of a modernist white cube, albeit one converted from a 19th-­century dairy.

The contrast between Hodgkin’s home and studio is instructive. Glass-roofed, white-walled and lit only by natural daylight, the artist’s studio was furnished only with comfortable chairs, painting equipment and large canvasses that were constructed solely for the purpose of concealing works in progress, some of which were literally years in the making.

Hodgkin’s studio, a converted dairy lit only by natural light, is linked directly to the house. The canvases were not for painting, Hodgkin only painted on wooden boards, but for covering his paintings while they were still works in progress. Sotheby’s

As Peattie explained, as Hodgkin grew older, so his work was conducted increasingly in his mind and through observation. Paintings were left facing the studio wall and only turned around at moments of inspiration, by which time their compositions and strokes had already been envisaged, enabling the painter to execute the swift, confident brushstrokes that were to become such a defining feature of his later work.

Hodgkin always insisted that painting was a torturous and solitary experience, which only became easier at the very end of his life, whereas collecting was quite the opposite. “Painting in a studio is naturally a lonely occupation,” he said. “Collecting, on the other hand, brings with it an almost automatic series of introductions, social contacts, with dealers, scholars and occasionally with fellow collectors.”

For Hodgkin, those collection-­based friendships not only included people who became fans and collectors of his work, such as the novelist Julian Barnes and the poet Seamus Heaney, but also people whose work he collected, such as Patrick Caulfield, whom Hodgkin once described as “the closest I ever came to having a painter-colleague”, and Bhupen Khakhar, whose De-Luxe Tailors (1972) promises to be one of the star lots in the forthcoming sale.

Hodgkin became friends with the collector Robert Erskine and through him, the network of Parisian dealers, including Charles “Uncle Charlie” Ratton. Robert Skelton, then assistant keeper at the V&A, also became a lifelong friend, who introduced him to other connoisseurs and collectors, such as Milo C Beach and Stuart Cary Welch, and filmmaker James Ivory, another famous collector of Indian miniatures whose career, like Hodgkin’s, was also transformed by visits to the Indian subcontinent.

According to Hodgkin’s wishes, the proceeds from various lots in the forthcoming auction will be donated to charities such as the Whitechapel Gallery education programme, the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

Hodgkin’s carefully displayed collection of antique procelain and a Mughal Chini Kana Panel from Agra, circa 1620. A Chini Khana was an architectural element often used in Mughal garden design comprising a series of sandstone walls such as the present example which were carved with recessed niches of varied forms on which oil lamps or floral vases could be placed. The term ‘Chini Khana’ itself can be translated as ‘China Cabinet’. Sotheby’s

“Howard liked the idea of a sale after his death. The objects have served their purpose to him, they were what he called his ‘must-haves’ that, in some mysterious way, fed his work,” Peattie explains.

“The sale represents a personal portrait of Howard. And it will enable his executors to fulfil his wishes.”

Howard Hodgkin: Portrait of the Artist is on display at Sotheby’s, London, with the auction to take place on Tuesday. Howard Hodgkin: India on Paper runs at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, until January 7; for more, see www.victoriagal.org.uk/events

This article was originally published in The National

Abu Dhabi: after a decade, it’s time to say goodbye

There is one story that I wanted to write during my time in Abu Dhabi but never managed to start, let alone finish, and will now always represent “the one that got away”.

My failure to write in any detail about the life of Mr R, a successful but disaffected painting, maintenance and relocations specialist, is not for want of material or conversation.

The septuagenarian businessman was always happy to talk to me about his many decades in the capital and the travails of his family and of middle class, non-resident Indian (NRI) life.

But despite visiting him several times in the tidy, filing cabinet-filled office from which he ran his business empire, I never asked Mr R to tell me about his life on the record, with a story in mind.

Looking back, I can offer no reason why as all the elements for a story were there. An aspiring young man from the foothills of the Himalayas, Mr R left India for the UAE in 1970, soon after he met his wife.

A demanding beauty from the Deccan Plateau, she eventually joined him in Abu Dhabi where she bore him three children, a daughter and two sons, all of whom went to university in North America and each of whom, he secretly hoped, would take over the family business.

A specialist in the timely and economical renovation of property, and the relocation of household goods, Mr R’s business thrived so much that he was able to buy land and build a house in Bangalore, but over the years the idea of moving to his palatial villa appealed less and less.

Despite the offer of a handsome dowry, Mr R struggled to marry off his handsome and intelligent daughter, the apple of his eye, because she had grown up outside India as a NRI, one of the people the anthropologist Neha Vora has described as the UAE’s impossible citizens.

Mr R’s daughter may have had an Indian passport, but there was no mistaking that her accent, her cultural references and her outlook on life were different – characteristics that might have been valued anywhere else but in a crowded and highly-competitive wedding market.

Even more to Mr R’s chagrin was the fact that neither of his sons were really interested in taking over the business that, perhaps even more than his family, represented the greatest achievement in the seventy-something’s life.

Despite the security and the considerable income on offer, the eldest decided to stay in North America while the youngest, who at least gave it a go, refused to relocate to Abu Dhabi from Dubai and eventually gave up, overwhelmed by the daily four-hour commute.

So what became of Mr R? The last time I saw him was fleetingly, three or four years ago, in a local supermarket.

As always he was immaculately turned out in slip-on shoes, cavalry twill slacks and a business shirt – white collar and cuffs – his thinning hair preternaturally glossy and black.

Was it finally time for him to move to the house that had consumed so many years and millions of rupees I asked, facing him over a pyramid of imported vegetables and fruit.

Mr R feared that it was not. He had never lived in Bangalore, he said, and had no desire to feel like a stranger in a place that, after more than 40 years, was his home in name only.

What would he do, he asked, without his business and without at least two of his children nearby?

I thought of him again recently, when it became time for me to make my own move back to the UK. I had long since lost his contact details and Mr R’s firm was not to the sort to have a website, but I wanted to see how he was and whether he had also decided to make the move back home.

Having no other way of reaching him, I decided to visit his office in Al Markaziyah.

Arriving in hope rather than expectation, I held my breath as I turned a corner at the junction of Khalifa and Liwa Streets only to find a scene I had half expected.

Rather than the flaking, three-storey concrete building that housed Mr R’s enterprise, all that remained was an empty patch of sand, sandwiched between two towering construction sites.

I asked local shopkeepers for any clues about his whereabouts, but even amongst those who did remember Mr R nobody knew anything.

Whatever his whereabouts, Mr R faced the same fate that befalls all UAE-based expats: even amongst the long-serving, when it is time to go we leave very little trace.

This story originally appeared in The National