Disruptions gathers fragmented screenshots taken by Taysir Batniji between 24 April 2015 and 23 June 2017 during WhatsApp video conversations with his mother and family in Gaza. Settled in Europe and unable to return to his homeland for years, Batniji found in this digital commons a crucial meeting ground—a space nonetheless shaped and destabilised by the same forces affecting his relatives in everyday life. The book, published by Loose Joints, collects images that oscillate between the casual domestic language of the family phone call and warped, degraded compositions, saturated with colour, obliterated with pixels and eradicated by distance.

Batniji’s poor images politically visualise how communication and daily life in Gaza are compromised by conflict, control and surveillance. Through resolution and compression, the noise and visual obliqueness of these screenshots create a thread between common intimacy and the violence imposed upon Gaza, while evoking the physical and emotional separation that occurs across borders. Batniji, trained as a painter at An-Najah National University, Nablus before continuing his studies in France, incorporates photography, video, drawing, installation and performance in a practice often tinged with impermanence and fragility.

The publication was announced on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calls for peace, and stands in support of the struggle for Palestinian freedom. All profits go towards Medical Aid for Palestinians. The 128-page book, at 155 by 216 millimetres, holds 60 colour plates in a section-sewn debossed softcover, with an essay in French, Arabic and English by Taous R. Dahmani; it won Photobook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2024.