Diptych: color photograph, inkjet print on paper, 47 x 70 cm, and Formica table, 70 x 85 cm

Taysir Batniji clings on to time, immortalizing the things around him that are disappearing. The diptych Tabula Ghaza, made in 2019, in a nod to the work One and Three Chairs (1965) by Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, bears witness to this. In this case this is not a chair, but a (gaming) table with a worn top, salvaged in Gaza in 2014, and a reproduction of the same table photographed nine years earlier by the artist, shortly before the blockade imposed by the Israeli State kept him out of his country for more than six years. Tabula rasa. The wear and passing of time. The twofold flatness (Greenbergian pictorial ideal) of this work, at first glance abstract, is far from being limited to its simple formality.