Batniji’s disrupted images visualise both the current violence and historical repression imposed on Palestine through digitally degraded images of video calls with his family in Gaza.

Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s diverse practice is often tinged with impermanence and fragility, drawing inspiration from his subjective experience and its relation to current events and history. In Disruptions, Batniji collects fragmented screenshots taken between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017 during several WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and family in Gaza. Settled in Europe and unable to return to his homeland for years, this digital commons provided a crucial meeting ground for Batniji and his family: a digital space nonetheless shaped and destabilised by the same forces affecting the artist’s relatives in everyday life.

Disruptions oscillates between the casual domestic language of the family phonecall and warped, degraded compositions, saturated with colour, obliterated with pixels, eradicated by distance. Through resolution and compression, Batniji’s poor images politically visualize how communication and daily life in Gaza are compromised by conflict, control and surveillance. In their noise and visual obliqueness, Batniji creates a thread between common intimacy and the colonial, now genocidal violence imposed upon Gaza to date, while evoking the physical and emotional separation that occurs across borders.

Announced on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the publication of Disruptions calls for peace and stands in support of the legitimate struggle for Palestinian freedom. 100% of the profits will go towards the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, providing crucial medical care and support on the ground.

Shafran's endlessly creative hand scribbles a life of photographic notes and observations, with his signature blend of simplicity, profundity, and wit.

Loose Joints is proud to present Workbooks: an extensive book that gathers together a creative lifetime of collecting, imagining, sketching and recording by British artist Nigel Shafran from 1984-2024. Below, writer David Chandler reflects on Shafran's Workbooks:

Books have been the principal means through which Nigel Shafran’s photographic work has become known. He understands the gift of their materiality and he has invested heavily in how his books look and in how they are made. But Shafran’s investment in book making is also integral to the way he builds his ideas and projects. It is ingrained in a process that sees his photographs, soon after they are made, printed, edited and stuck into the pages of bound volumes that are part workbook, part diary, part aide-memoire.