Home Away from Home
Home Away from Home
Size: 22.2 x 27.3
Pages: 196
Published by Aperture and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, 2018
“When I had the idea of working on the Home Away from Home project alongside my cousins emigrated to the United States, and after contacting them by phone, I felt the need to reconnect with this part of my family and my life. I hadn’t seen my cousins since I was a child in Gaza. So I started a series of drawings from memory, in pencil and watercolour. To remind me of their faces and appearance first, then to imagine what they might look like today. Then, always from memory, I drew some kind of “souvenir photos”, “snapshots” of their summer visits to Gaza in the 1970s. Then, before and during the project, I put on paper childhood memories that surfaced again. The drawings “Jet Lag”, “Untitled / Water” and “Untitled / Sand”, on the other hand, are a kind of installation, objects or sculptures inspired by my travels between Paris and the United States, between Florida and California.” - Taysir Batniji
Palestinian French artist Taysir Batniji is the third recipient of Immersion, a French American Photography Commission, a program launched by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in alliance with Aperture Foundation. In Home Away from Home, Batniji brings together photographs, selections from family archives, videos, drawings, and writings to explore the sense of dislocation and the different ideas of "home" experienced by various members of his family who immigrated to the United States from the Middle East. As Batniji explains, "The state of 'between-ness'—cultural as well as geographic—is an issue that has preoccupied me since I first arrived in France in 1995. Exile, displacement, and mobility are themes that have driven my work for many years." The work Batniji has created, during visits to Florida and California, strives to connect to and understand his "American cousins" through their daily lives, the objects that surround them, and the homes they have made. The resulting photographs and portraits, interviews, and sketches from memory of the family homestead in Gaza question what it means to share a history, even among relative strangers—and what happens to a sense of the past and of belonging when opting for new identities and new homes. Copublished by Aperture and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès