Taysir Batniji is an artist born in Gaza, who now lives and works between France and Palestine. Batniji’s artwork, often tinged with impermanence and fragility, draws its inspiration from his lived experiences of colonisation, displacement and cultural dissonance.

Just in Case #2 is a body of work developed in the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza launched in October 2023. The installation explores profound emotions of loss and exile through the symbol of the key, a motif which permeates the artist’s work in various forms. The key is a widely-recognised Palestinian symbol of homes lost in the 1948 Nakba, when more than 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the establishment of the State of Israel. Many of those expelled took their house keys with them, hopeful that they might one day be able to return and re-open their front doors. The keys have been passed on from generation to generation as a reminder of the homes that were taken from them, and their right to return.

One of those keys appears in Just in Case #2, amongst dozens of newer keys. The key to an old family house in the former Palestinian village of Bi’r as-Saba, now called Beer Sheva, is joined on a keyring by the key to the Gaza home of Hatem Kamel Mohamed Dalloul, destroyed in a bombing on November 18, 2023. Using his network of contacts in Gaza, Batniji asked displaced people to photograph their keys and send the images back to him. Composed of hundreds of stories of ruined homes and displaced civilians, Just in Case #2 focuses on these contemporary keys and their poignantly altered symbolism, as the majority of the houses have been destroyed by Israeli bombs, and cannot be returned to. The work invites viewers to immerse themselves in the deeply human story of each of these everyday objects, and consider their own security and the privilege of having a home. Texts, meticulously inscribed with pencil directly onto the wall, recount dates of displacements and destruction, and form a sombre record of lives lost and neighbourhoods flattened. Just in Case #2 stands as a poignant reminder of the resilience and the unyielding spirit of those who have lost so much, yet continue to hold onto the hope of returning home.