Francis Alÿs: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic

Interviews by the artist with Ruben Aberjil, Albert Agazarian, Yael Dayan, Jean Fisher, Rima Hamami, Amira Hass, Nazmi Jobeh, Yael Lerer, Eyal Sivan, Michael Warschawski, and Eyal Weizman

Available in hardcover, this catalogue was published on the occasion of Francis Alÿs’s first solo exhibition at David Zwirner in 2007. The exhibition presented a film by Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux alongside a map of the artist’s journey, photocollages, paintings, drawings, and a group of sculptures. The film shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War of Independence ended in 1948. It questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This trilingual exhibition catalogue (English, Hebrew, and Arabic) features interviews conducted by Alÿs with eleven activists, academics, and journalists. Also included are a fold-out map and DVD of the film with options to listen to the recorded interviews.