
(Click to enlarge) Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), detail, 2001–2. 12 digital C-prints, AP 1/3, each 18 1/8 x 23 13/16 in.
Contested ownership of land is at the center of many of the works on display. The Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s contribution to the show is Kings of the Hill (2003), a video shot at the resort town Herzliya Pituach, near her home in Tel Aviv. It documents the weekly pastime of a group of Israeli men who ride their SUV’s across the sand dunes, which for all of its competition and aggression brings to mind the region’s territorial conflicts. Along a different border in the American Southwest, the artist Santiago Sierra hired a group of men to inscribe the word “Submisión” into a plot of land in Anapra, Mexico, just west of Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Sierra chose this location, one of the most impoverished and polluted in Mexico, to denote the disproportionate burden carried by the poor when it comes to environmental degradation.