Exposition Home away from home

I was born in Gaza in 1966 into a family of manufacturers, just a few months before the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation. From 1985 to 1992, against my parents' wishes, I studied fine arts at An-Najah National University in Nablus. I received a scholarship to continue my studies at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges (France) and I obtained my National Diploma of Plastic Expression (DNSEP) in 1997. I then divided my time between France and Palestine, until 2006, when Gaza became inaccessible (it still is today), due to the siege imposed by Israel.

The following works were produced as part of Immersion, a Franco-American photographic commission, a program launched by the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès in alliance with the Aperture Foundation. I proposed to retrace the history and journey of some of my cousins who, after graduating from university, had all chosen to emigrate and settle in the United States starting in the 1960s, an era of economic immigration. Was it the lure of the American dream? Was it pure chance or a whim?

I have met them all in the past, briefly. When I was a kid, they often came to Gaza in the summer, and once or twice they came to France, where I have been living since 2006. However, I was always intrigued by their decision to live in the United States. I myself am the only one in my immediate family to have left Gaza; I now live in Paris with my wife, Sophie, and my children, Saad and Amir. The in-between - cultural and geographical - is a question that preoccupies me. Exile, displacement and mobility are themes that have animated my work for many years. For this reason, I chose to focus on my cousins Kamal, Khadra, Sobhi, Ahmed, Samir and Akram, and their American experience. I sought to explore their desire to live in their chosen place and their desire to stay connected to their origins and return. This contradiction - the dislocation between the past that haunts us and the present that inhabits us - constantly plays tricks on us and remains perpetually unresolved.

The work presented here is the result of stays I made in 2017 in Florida, where Ahmed and his family reside, and in California, where I lived with Sobhi and Khadra, Kamal, Samir, Akram, and their respective families. I do not pretend to reveal the lives of my American cousins in all their angles and complexity, nor do I offer an exhaustive study of the Arab or Palestinian diaspora in the United States. Rather, these are spontaneous impressions or captures, born of these encounters, varying in their intensity, depending on the context, the place and the degree of interaction with these family members.

Taysir Batniji