The Brooklyn Rail

Hell, in painting, film, and literature, is often represented as a place one can go, with identifiable features and figures, its own topography and structure that one can traverse.

But this misses something essential about the idea of absolute suffering. Hell, rather, should be indistinct—uncomprehending of anything except the omnipresence of pain. But, such a Hell resists presentation.

Taysir Batniji’s 2024 photobook Disruptions, from which 100 percent of the profits go to the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians, approaches this manner of depicting hell. Born in Gaza, and splitting his time between France and Palestine since 1994, Batniji’s family—and his own diasporic remove—has long been a focus of his work. This photobook presents a series of screenshots taken between 2015 and 2017 of frozen WhatsApp video calls with his family members at home in Gaza. Before any visuals, the dedication page immediately inaugurates the atmosphere: “I dedicate this publication to my mother (1933–2017) and to the fifty-two members of my immediate family who died during Israeli bombings in November 2023.” As the artist explains, Batniji’s sister, her husband, their children and grandchildren, his cousins, his brother, and “all those who sought refuge in our family home,” were murdered by Israel, along with so many others, in the ongoing genocidal war.

The images that follow are almost unbearable. They are pixelated, glitched, and oddly colored—the effect of Gaza’s poor (or disrupted) internet and cell signal. The distortion makes faces and buildings appear as if they are melting or bursting apart. In one of the most haunting images, a room (a bedroom? a hospital room?) pixelates into a smattering of grays and greens and reds—a crimson smear effacing the lower right hand corner, echoed by a clump of reddish-black and some pinkish stains on the bed itself. In another, a glitch elongates a person’s neck into a stretching pattern of diamonds, culminating in an almost featureless face extending past the upper left corner of the frame. The figure’s eyes have become patches of flesh, its mouth two wisps of white. Throughout the book, forest green blocks of color coat entire pages. Green is often used as an allusion to Palestine; but here it conjures the night vision of an attack drone. There is an element of the hunt—in one sequence the colors of a man’s face peek out above a wall of ubiquitous green, only to be completely swallowed by green on the following page—his head sinking a bit, his features just legible enough to remind us that this is a man. The atmosphere is truly hellish. In another context these images can be seen as only an annoyance—a frozen call; but in Gaza, which has been subject to blockade and bombing for years, these violent associations—a severed head, a bloodied room—are unavoidable.

These oblique images of death have a power that photographs of the actual violence do not. In one image, we see a pink building that appears to be tipping over, the street deformed in large gray pixels beneath it, and a person blurred but upright. Above the scene, a wedge of hyper-saturated blue sky interposes between the building and the street. What is happening? Is this building actually falling? Is that a person looking at the destruction? Are they running away? Had this been an image of a destroyed building, it could be easily categorized within an awful, but still recognizable lexicon of images—its power muted by its unfortunate familiarity. Batniji’s screenshot, on the other hand, is utter chaos. This confusion, this inability to see, presents hell as an atmosphere. We want to know, we suspect there is something to know, but we are permanently denied.

Batniji conjures a more familiar terror: the inability to see and connect with loved ones. What emerges in Disruptions, then, is a visual testament to the distortions that occur in the distance between Gaza and the rest of the world—the inability to communicate the horrors, the inadequacy of images. It is this very inadequacy, this deformed incompleteness, however, that gives these specific images the ability to puncture the placid witnessing of so many in the West. The way to bridge this gap in understanding is to present a clarity disrupted, an image lost in transmission.