Digital Disruptions of Gaza: Everyday Fear and Uncertainty in the Artist’s Book

Description

Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions (2024) is a photobook composed of screenshots from WhatsApp video calls between the Palestinian artist and his family in Gaza. Captured between 2015 and 2017, the degraded images within the work illustrate the paradox of sustaining everyday life amidst conflict. This communication focuses how Disruptions invokes the persistent fear of violence that affects daily life in Gaza, through the medium of the artist’s book. Drawing on the politics of fear and violence according to Judith Butler (2004) and Frank Furedi (2018), I examine the depiction of fear and uncertainty in Disruptions using distorted video calls between family. I situate the work within Edward Said’s (1985) reading on difference as an ideological construct, to frame the broader conflict in Palestine. Following this, I conduct a multimodal analysis of the artist’s photobook, grounded in Johanna Drucker’s (2004) conceptualisation of the book as an instrument for artistic production. In this context, I argue that Disruptions functions not only as a representation of disrupted communication, but also as artistic commentary on the normalisation of war and fear, emphasised by the transformation of digital images (immaterial) into a physical book (material). Ultimately, through its artistic documentation of disrupted moments, Batniji’s work reveals how fear shapes, distorts, and is resisted within the everyday. The artist’s photobook thus becomes a powerful cultural object that reframes the experience of conflict and separation through artistic expression and cultural resistance.

Period	25 Sept 2025
Event title	III Atlantic Conference: History, Culture and Heritage: Fears, Beliefs and Representations
Event type	Conference
Conference number	III
Location	Ponta Delgada, PortugalShow on map