In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks holding a punctured can of dribbling green paint along the contested width of the so-called Green Line established between Israel and its neighbours following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In formal terms, The Green Line is a reenactment of an earlier work, The Leak (1996), in which the artist took a can dribbling blue paint for a walk and installed the empty container in the gallery. By recontextualising The Leak in geopolitical terms, Alÿs relocates the tensions in the work from those formal ideas of action and painting to questions of maps and territories and who has the right to live where.

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