The three works included in this exhibition, much like the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, all explore the relationship between history, time, and place.

Regina José Galindo and Francis Alÿs both draw on the traditions of walking art and performance art, using video to document their actions. 

Galindo’s work draws attention to contemporary situations of oppression, specifically those affecting women. The Documenta 14 exhibition (which included La Sombra) received substantial state funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the German Federal Foreign Office, yet Germany is one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers. Galindo’s work accentuates and critiques the source of this money, deriving from an economy complicit in the arms trade and dependent on war. Similarly, the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt emphasized the extent to which the military and economic power of their aggressors was contingent on the oppression of strangers in the land.

Alÿs’s interventions are often situated in places of societal and economic crisis or political impasse and he has identified Jerusalem as the archetypal city of conflict. His performance of The Green Line has a dialectical quality that draws attention to the artificiality and absurdity of borders whilst at the same time reinserting ‘the green line’ (which has had no real political bearing since 1967) into the landscape. Alÿs’s walk translated the original green wax pencil line, drawn on a 1:20,000 scale map, into a 1:1 scale map drawn on the surface of a real city. The original line, 3–4mm wide would have appeared neat and lucid on the map but when scaled up, it equates to a strip of land 60 to 80 metres in width. The wobbly line that spilled from Alÿs’s paint can create a far more accurate map, but one that could only be understood by taking a line for a walk.

Like Alÿs, the Israelites as they walked created a map of the land and used it to make sense of their history and their place in time. It was a collective act of remembrance through which they developed a coherent story about their experiences and about God’s promises and provision. The idea of the journey had been planted in their collective memory years earlier when Joseph extracted a promise from his brothers to carry his bones from Egypt (Genesis 50:25) to bring them out of Egypt and into the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The title of Tacita Dean’s work, My English Breath in Foreign Clouds, is taken from a passage in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV of England, describes his experience of exile. The Bible includes more than fifty references to the resident alien: ‘You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9 NRSV). The Hebrew word that is translated here as ‘resident aliens’ is gerim, from the verb gur (to live or reside somewhere). In the Bible, a ger is someone residing outside their own people’s land. In this argument from historical empathy, the Israelites are called to show compassion to strangers, perhaps best understood today as migrants or refugees living in exile.

The risk of erasure is significant in each of the three works: it is found in the ephemeral subject matter and medium of Dean’s drawing; in Alÿs’s green line that risks being obliterated by feet, traffic, and rain; and in Galindo’s fragile figure seemingly on the brink of extermination by the tank. In Dean’s and Alÿs’s works, this fragility draws attention to the absurdity of trying to impose unnatural boundaries or to fix things on a changing world. Dean has said that ‘all the things I am attracted to are just about to disappear’ (Royoux et al. 2006: 17). The slate on which Dean’s drawing is made brings to mind the first set of tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written. Shortly after the commandments were given, the tablets were broken (Exodus 32:19). 

Some 800 years later, the prophet Jeremiah foretold a new covenant between God and his people: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people’ (Jeremiah 31:33 NRSV). Along with Jeremiah, these works remind us that—unlike the inscriptions with which we seek to mark the external world—inscriptions created through experience and written on the heart are indelible and cannot be broken or erased.

References

Dean, Tacita. 2006. ‘Interview 007: Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean’ in Tacita Dean, ed. by Jean-Cristophe Royoux, Marina Warner, and Germaine Greer (London: Phaidon)