Gaza Diary

The dialogue between Taysir the Palestinian and Batniji the artist was most explicit in the video Gaza, journal intime (Gaza, diary), in which brief glimpses of the streets and markets of Gaza City were brutally intercut with a recurring sequence of a bloody piece of meat being chopped on a butcher’s block. With the untitled double photomural, the dialogue was rather between the living and the dead. These dense mosaics of ghostly, close-cropped faces—somewhere between icons and X rays—were in fact portraits of some 180 Gazans killed during the intifada, reworked from ID photos and snapshots to transform living images into effigies of the dead that appeared and disappeared like fleeting memories as the viewer walked in front of them.