Dima Srouji and Taysir Batniji

Dima Srouji

Dima Srouji’s interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of history, colonialism, and the politics of place, exploring spaces for potential collective repair. Through close collaborations with archaeologists, anthropologists, and artisans, Srouji engages with materials such as glass, plaster, archival documents, text, and film to question and challenge the concept of cultural heritage in the Arab world, and particularly within the context of Palestine.

Prompted by the urgency of the violence in Palestine, Srouji's approach investigates the architectural "what-ifs": unrealised historical plans, abandoned structures, and speculative designs that gesture toward alternative futures. Through these inquiries, she transforms fragments of survival into tangible visions for collective liberation.

Her project Jaffa: Fragments from a Continuous Modernity explores the unrealised 1946–48 master plan for Jaffa, the last attempt by the city's Palestinian mayor to present a "modern" vision to the British Mandate authorities, aimed at preventing the city's occupation. Srouji revives this phantom plan not out of nostalgia, but as a critical reflection on the assumed relationship between modernity and freedom.

She uncovers the irony that, by embracing the coloniser's definition of "modernity," the plan inherently contained the logic of its own erasure, challenging the assumption that marginalised peoples must perform civilisation to exist. In a context where architecture often plays a role in systems of violence, Srouji's work stands as a powerful reminder of its potential as a tool for memory, a vessel for the spirit, and a foundation for liberation.

Taysir Batniji

Born in Gaza, Taysir Batniji has lived and worked between Palestine and France since the 1990s. His work spans photography, drawing, painting, video, installation, and performance. Batniji's artwork is marked by a poetic restraint and conceptual precision.

Rather than presenting overt political statements, he turns to the everyday, the overlooked, and the ephemeral to reflect on the effects of loss, and fragmentation. Drawing from his personal history, collective memory, and broader historical narratives, he approaches his subjects with a sense of poetic detachment-distorting, displacing, and reimagining them to offer layered and critical reflections on lived reality.

For many years, he has been unable to return to Gaza, a rupture that underscores much of his production. Distance, silence, and absence are not merely themes but materials that shape his practice. Through subtle, resonant gestures, he creates contemplative spaces that speak to the precariousness of place, identity, and belonging in a fractured world.

Batniji presents a selection of works centred on the motif of keys, objects he has explored from the 1990's as powerful metaphors for dispossession and displacement. These works evoke the immobilisation Palestinians face in their daily lives, and the inability to control or shape space and time.

He also presents Homeless Colors, a series created using found crayons, ballpoint pens, and felt-tip markers. In these drawings, the artist engages in a meditative, almost spiritual process, an intimate retreat from the harsh realities that surround him. Conceived during a time of profound shock in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the series reflects a state of collective and personal grief, a silence born of trauma that leaves no room for words.